The comic strip Frazz, by Jef Mallett, touches another bit of mathematics humor. I imagine if I were better-organized I’d gather all the math comic strips I see over a whole week and report on them all at once, but, I’m still learning the rules of this blog, other than that anyone writing about mathematics has to bring up Fibonacci whether they want to or not.
The association that sequins brings up for me now, though, and has ever since a book I read about the United States’s war on the Barbary Coast pirates, is that the main coin of Venice for over 500 years of its existence as an independent republic was the sequin, giving me notions of financial transactions being all sparkly and prone to blowing away in a stiff breeze. It wasn’t that kind of sequin, of course or even any sort of particularly small coin. The Venetian sequin was a rather average-looking gold coin, weighing at least nominally three and a half grams, and the name was a mutation of “zecchino”, after the name of Venice’s mint. But, apparently, the practice of sewing coins like this into women’s clothing or accessories lead to the attaching of small, shiny objects into clothing or accessories, and so gave us sequins after all.
A listing on a coin collectors site tells me the Venetian sequin was about two centimeters in diameter, which isn’t ridiculously tiny at least. I’m not sure if that is a reliable guide to the size, although since it’s trying to sell me rare coins, probably it’s not too far off. Unfortunately most of the top couple pages of Google hits on “Venetian sequin coin size” brings up copies of Wikipedia’s report, which fails to mention physical size. An Ottoman sequin at the British Museum’s web site lists its diameter as 2.4 centimeters, but its weight at four and a third grams.
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