| Favourite Functions? |
[19 Jul 2008|12:43pm] |
Hi all, I'm making various kinds of art and incorporating pretty bits of math. Will you participate by telling me about your favourite functions? They don't have to be too complicated. In fact they are more likely to be made if they're less visually more complex but conceptually interesting. Please include pictures if you feel so inclined. :) I promise I'll post pictures of my projects as I make them. (Though I am a PhD student in the sciences rather than the arts, so production may not be too quick.)
Thank you!
update: thank you for all the suggestions so far! If you want to help me plan my first piece, please check out my lj.
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| Waffles |
[18 Jul 2008|08:18am] |
Suppose you have put jam on a waffle, and assume that it is evenly spread: every point on the waffle has 1 millimeters of jam or 0 millimeters of jam. Given an equator line, consider the jam along every line parallel to it. How would you go about choosing the initial equator line that minimizes the standard deviation among the lines parallel to it?
Bonus points: what if each point has between 0 and 1 millimeters of jam, inclusively?
EDIT: Let's restrict the problem so that all points with jam form a closed set. In the bonus problem, let's require waffle-> jam to be continuous.
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| O_o |
[12 Jul 2008|12:30am] |
Who else has seen this?
I'm all tingly.
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| How Much Time Do We Spend in the Bathroom? |
[19 Jun 2008|11:43pm] |
I was wondering about the odds of having an open bathroom when you needed one, and it's very obvious that 2 bathrooms among 4 people is def. better than 1 bathroom among 2 people.
But I'd like to calculate some numbers for x people among y bathrooms. What's the longest you might have to wait? What are the chances a bathroom being open?
But to do this, I'll actually need some data.
Can anyone join me in recording their bathroom usage for a week? Just how long you spent, what you were doing (my reasoning for this data is that someone could urinate while you were showering, and there needs to be a little air time immediately after a defecation usually, for example), and what day it was on?
Thanks!
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| The most awesome maths music video in the universe. |
[19 Jun 2008|09:52pm] |
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| Nice bumper sticker |
[18 Jun 2008|09:31pm] |
Today on the way home from work, I saw a bumper sticker on a redneck looking truck that said "√69 = 8 sumthin'."
~mike~
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| xkcd strikes again. |
[11 Jun 2008|10:21am] |
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| "Teach yourself mathematics" |
[10 Jun 2008|12:26am] |
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music |
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take me to the bonuslevel because i need an extralife - pornophonique |
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I ran into this on a forum, would you add anything?
In my experience, the best way to teach yourself mathematics is to do it yourself. A good way to approach learning something is as follows:
1) Look at the theorem.
2) Really look at the theorem, and try to figure out what everything in it means. How do the different parts fit together?
3) Try the theorem on a simple example (e.g. with small integers, or in a low number of dimensions) and try to find counterexamples. Convince yourself that it really is true.
4) Try to prove the theorem generally. Have a good go at this, until you really get stuck.
5) Look up the proof of the theorem given in the text, up until you reach something that you hadn't thought of yet. Maybe this extra hint is what you need to prove the theorem!
6) Try to prove the theorem using your new knowledge. Keep going until you get stuck again.
7) Go to step 5.
Good luck! :) --Cexy
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| "Onal house of panc" |
[04 Jun 2008|01:19pm] |
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mood |
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 chipper |
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I saw this sign in Seattle recently - "International house of pancakes" minus a few letters.
What struck me, though, was that "onal" might well be the most almost dirty four-letter word in the english language.
With single letter substitutions you can get oral, anal, and onan. Are there any N-letter words that are more "almost dirty"? And am I missing any for onal?
I kind of like the sound of "house of panc", too, but it's not quite as mathy.
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| A Call for Help! (Also extremely awesome geekery!) |
[03 Jun 2008|11:17pm] |
I'm trying to track down this journal article, which presents the Hebrew "translation" of the tablet inscriptions in Knuth's Surreal Numbers. As a language nerd, and a lover of Conway, I'd be thrilled to have this hanging on my wall. If you think you can help, please drop me a line.
The Conway Stones: What the Original Hebrew May Have Been
Daniel M. Berry and Moshe Yavne
Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Sep., 1976), pp. 207-210
x-posted to linguaphiles
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| Rudin? |
[01 Jun 2008|05:00pm] |
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music |
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Cool Scene - The Dandy Warhols |
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Hi there,
I'm just curious, why does everyone* want to sex Rudin? I'm working through The Principles of Mathematical Analysis, and admittedly, I don't quite see what the fan fare is about. It's just very lucid, well written mathematics. Why do people laud him as The intro to rigourous analysis for undergrads.
Also, do you have any Rudin anecdotes?
*: A lot of amazon reviews and bloggers.
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| Badiou Badiou Badiou Badiou Mushroom Mushroom! |
[01 Jun 2008|12:16am] |
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| Last name |
[31 May 2008|04:06pm] |
My last name is Adde. Today I was informed that this was a hexadecimal number! I was shocked I hadn't realized it myself. I just recieved this email regarding that conversation:
Just checked with a decent calculator:
hexadecimal ADDE equals decimal 44510,
octal 126736, binary 1010110111011110.
Interpreted as a Unicode character, it unfortunately doesn't correspond
to a Han/Kanji ideograph, but to the Hangul (Korean) syllable GYUGG
---M.
I'd love it if you could tell me what makes that number interesting if anything.
In other words, say my name.
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| mandelbrot nipples |
[27 May 2008|12:47am] |
Alex, my male, went to the gym and I went to sleep. I partially woke up later when he spooned me and stroked my breasts. It made for some interesting half awake dream hallucinations.
As he pinched and pulled at my nipples I imagined he was defining the most pleasurable polymorphisms of nucleic acid secondary structure that were my nipples. The secondary structure in question was that of a loop of a stem and loop structure. There were many of them and Alex was making all the right ones sing. The secondary structure was somehow the same as the bugs of the Mandelbrot set that form "loops" on stems of its infinitely complex border. Somehow being on a stem connoted erectness of nipple loop.
to aid your visualization:
 
(Clearly I've been contemplating my tattoo a bit much. The nucleic acid connection comes from studying genetics. The picture above is of the relatively simple structure of transfer RNA, other RNA based molecules can get crazy complicated.)
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| Zeno's Paradox |
[23 May 2008|09:19pm] |
It's not a paradox. It doesn't make sense to me at all how anyone could think that this is a paradox. About the only thing to be learned here is that if time is discrete and space is continuous, then there cannot be continuous motion. That's hardly a paradox. Why is that supposed to be a paradox? We're just trying to move from A to B, not move from A to B while stopping to use every possible rest stop along the way.
Zeno = FAIL.
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| An Abelian Rape! |
[23 May 2008|05:31pm] |
By request from ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) moosehead_beer, here's my first post to this community. It centers around something a friend said in a DC++ chat:incredibleedible: whats round and green and commutes?
incredibleedible: an abelian rape
incredibleedible: *grape I think it's very clear that an "Abelian rape" would be an event with two persons, X and Y, that is equally well-described by "X rapes Y" and "Y rapes X."
Your task is to find me some concrete examples of Abelian rape, because I'm having a hard time with the idea. Here are my first thoughts:
(1) We define "rape" to include both statutory and forcible rape, then say that X is underage, and X forcibly rapes Y, who is an adult. X (forcibly) rapes Y, and Y (statutorily) rapes X. My problem with this is that it's equivocation -- I'm using the word "rape" in two different ways when I do the commutation, and I feel like it's not really the same operation.
(2) Some evil supervillain E mind-controls two people, X and Y, so that they have sex with each other without either consenting to the action. Unfortunately, I kind of feel like E is raping both X and Y, rather than either one raping the other.
(3) Like (2) but remove E: suppose we set up a theoretical box where, if you pull the lever, you are injected with some hypothetical chemical that bodily (but not mentally) commits you to having sex with someone in the next room. X and Y both go through this box into the next room, and there's nobody else around -- but the two people don't want to have sex. Since each is an unwilling participant in a sex act, each is being raped; but the symmetry of the situation guarantees that the situation is Abelian. My problem with this is that I don't like the idea that you could basically sign a contract to have sex with the person in the next room and it could still be rape. I understand it, but it sounds weird.
(4) Maybe the weirdness of (3) is resolved if neither X nor Y knows what the box does? But then I feel like the responsibility shifts to the box-creator who didn't put appropriate warning signs up. And X and Y still chose to pull the lever without knowing what it would do.
Your help in generating a clear-cut Abelian rape would be appreciated.
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| Writing code |
[11 May 2008|05:46pm] |
 My friend wrote this on my back. It spells an apt comment: 
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| Propositional logic examples? |
[03 May 2008|05:24pm] |
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Any fun examples of English sentences that can be symbolized with propositional logic? I'm drawing a blank.
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