Category Archives: mathematics

eavesdropping on illumination

Another reason to switch to LCD. (But I’m spoiled by 1600×1200 resolution.)

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hello web!

The newest contributor to my hit-count is a link from Andrea and Friedrich Lohmueller, whose image galleries are worth the visit.

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precision ≠ accuracy

Go get ’em! The LP responds to the notorious infamous “if you buy dope you’re supporting terrorism” spot with this newspaper advertisement. (Thanks to Ananda, who credits Declan McCullagh.) Pet peeve nº 17000: false precision. When you write “boosts . . . … Continue reading

Posted in drugwar, mathematics | 1 Comment

hyperbolic, baby!

Pretty things: hyperbolic planar tesselations by Don Hatch. Presented in the conformal Poincaré disc mapping, which is the most common; it’s analogous to stereographic projection of a sphere. Another favorite mapping is the half-plane, which has no analogue that I … Continue reading

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activities

One of my friends is thinking of organizing an ‘activities day’ for our circle, and invites me to run a workshop relating to my most visible hobby, mathematical beauty. Okay, I said, but what would we do?

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this is serious!

An old friend calls my attention to this proof of the irrationality of pi, which happens to be a mere link or two away from this favorite essay in historical linguistics; each is in a perhaps surprising literary form.

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soap films

I’ve begun to learn to use Ken Brakke’s Surface Evolver. Haven’t yet found whether it has the one feature that would make it ideal for my exploration of nonspherical ‘dome’ forms: ability to constrain the edges to equal length. The … Continue reading

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