“I have discovered a truly remarkable woman which this binder is too small to contain”
Category: Miscellany
Painting In Three Dimensions
Whenever I do painting, I’m always thankful I live in just three dimensions, and not, say, two hundred and three. Now, I know that sounds a bit odd, but there’s a good reason for it.
Writing Practice
The danger of living with a mathematician is that sometimes your grade 1 writing practice is like this :
Continue reading Writing Practice
Relativistic Share Trading
Once upon a time, if you wanted to buy or sell shares in a company, your wishes would be conveyed by word of mouth to a broker on the trading floor of a stock exchange. Then, he’d have to find another broker on the same floor willing to match your offer. This would, of course, take some time.
Homework
My son wrote an essay recently. The topic was ‘homework’. It left me with this impression :-
Is Math The Primum Movens?
Some time ago, I wrote a couple of posts distinguishing All Possible Math from the Math We Know. In short, people only study the mathematics that is interesting or useful to us, and not too hard. When you think about that it becomes clear that there’s a lot more mathematics possible than the stuff Homo Sapiens talks about. Much of All Possible Math would be uninteresting for us, useless and/or too hard to grasp.
Keep This In Mind
When reading the news, keep in mind that just because two things change together, doesn’t mean there’s any direct causal link.
7 Billion
According to official sources, the world’s 7 billionth person was born today. This is a fiction. The goal is to raise awareness about the world’s population. It’s working – the news seems to be all over the blogosphere.
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Mathematics
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers the foundations of mathematics to be contradictory, they will instantly disappear and be replaced with something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened”
Dice and Polynomials – Part 2
In my last blog post, I explained how to quickly and easily work out, say, the number of ways to get a 10 on three dice, just by multiplying together some polynomials. It doesn’t have to be real dice of course. The trick works just as well for spinners, balls in a hat, or computer random number generators.