Nice polynomials are polynomials whose coefficients, roots, and critical points are integers. The earliest papers on nice polynomials [1, 2, 3] give an explicit formula for all nice cubics. All the derivations of this formula use Pythagorean triples.

In 1999 the problem of finding, constructing, and classifying nice polynomials was added to the list of unsolved problems [4] in The American Mathematical Monthly. Other papers soon followed, including [5] and [6], with extending the results of nice polynomials to polynomials with coefficients, roots, and critical points in integral domains D. Such polynomials are called D-nice.

Is there a three-dimensional equivalent of the Pythagorean theorem? It all depends, of course, what one means by equivalent. There are in fact several distinct results which can with some justice be regarded as threedimensional equivalents of the theorem.

One interpretation of the Pythagorean theorem is as a statement about any rectangle, expressing the square of its diagonal as the sum of the squares of its height and length. This readily extends to the case of a rectangular box (cuboid), for which the square of its long diagonal always equals the sum of the squares of its height, length and depth.

A friendly engineer recently sent me a version of Figure 1 below, and asked me to explain the connection between it and the well-known Fibonacci Problem (FP) about calculating a population of rabbits. He knew that Figure 1 was related to the ‘Divine Proportion’ or ‘Golden Ratio’ ϕ ( = ½(√5 - l), which also occurs in the solution to FP, and wondered how such different problems could be related by such a number. (He unfortunately regarded ϕ as 0.618 exactly, thus missing a lot of stuff to arouse curiosity.) I knew of various references that I could recommend, but none covered all the things my engineer mentioned, so I constructed the following mathematical development, leaving the relations with biology and architecture to be explained in the books referenced later, see for example [1]. A matrix approach is used here, and may be new to those readers of the Gazette who may be quite familiar with the other material.

According to various sources (e.g. [1, p. 102]), the terminology of the power of a point with respect to a circle is due to Steiner. His definition appears in most classical and contemporary geometry textbooks (to mention just a few references, see [2, 3, 4, 5]). The concept of the power of a point has been revisited not only in advanced Euclidean geometry, but also in computational geometry and other areas of mathematics.

In the current literature there are two different definitions of the power of a point with respect to a circle, which we study in detail in section 2. In the first half of the twentieth century there have been published several attempts to generalise the concept of power of the point to real algebraic curves.

The nine points for which the nine-point circle is named are the vertices of three triangles: the medial, orthic, and Euler triangles of a reference triangle ABC. All nine of the vertices lie on the circle, which Dan Pedoe [1] proclaims ‘the first really exciting one to appear in any course on elementary geometry’. An online summary of properties of the circle, which is also called the Euler circle, is given at MathWorld [2].

The parabolic orbit is rarely found in nature although the orbits of some comets have been observed to be very close to parabolic. The parabola is of interest mathematically because it represents the boundary between the open and closed orbit forms. An object moving along a parabolic path is on a oneway trip to infinity never being able to retrace the same orbit again. The velocity of such an object is the escape velocity and its total energy is zero.

The mysterious path of discovery – the tireless experimentation in search of patterns, the veiled connections that suddenly unfold, serendipity – all these elements combine to make mathematics so magical. The purpose of this note is to show how a routine algebraic identity, the binomial expansion of (x - 1)2, can be used to give a new proof of the fundamental inequality between the arithmetic and geometric means. The proof will provide further evidence that a great deal of useful mathematics can be derived from the obvious assertion that the square of a real number is never negative.

The Farey series of order n, Fn, consists of all the fractions between 0 and 1 (inclusive) with denominators less than or equal to n, arranged in order of magnitude and expressed in their lowest terms, so that for example The most obvious way of computing one is to assign a long series of stores and then insert the terms with denominator 1, with denominator 2, … , shifting the terms already there to make room for the new ones in their correct positions. This may require a large amount of storage and is fairly slow because of the large amount of shifting involved: for instance F1025 has 319765 terms, and occupies 400 printed pages (see Neville [1]). Neville also gives a table related to F100, which has 3045 terms. His procedures, a heroic application of pencil-and-paper methods, are described at the end of this paper.