Category Archives: mathematics

naming is hard

Posted on Saturday, 2014 May 10 by Anton

I often have trouble giving meaningful concise names to variables in the programs I write, perhaps because, until I reach for the keyboard, my thinking is largely nonverbal. I suspect that it would be less of a problem for someone … Continue reading →

Posted in curve-fitting, neep-neep | 4 Comments

relax

Posted on Tuesday, 2014 April 01 by Anton

This curve-fitting thingy is one of several projects on which I’ve made progress in rare fits over several years. It ran into two big snags. I haven’t found how to determine which gridpoints are within the pen-width of a blending … Continue reading →

Posted in curve-fitting | 2 Comments

FCC cube generator

Posted on Saturday, 2014 February 01 by Anton

I could have used this a week ago. def fccstack(): newlimit = 0 while True: oldlimit = newlimit newlimit += 1 # extend z for x in xrange(oldlimit): for y in xrange((x+oldlimit)&1, oldlimit, 2): yield (x,y,oldlimit) # extend y for … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematics, neep-neep | Leave a comment

some thoughts about packing

Posted on Monday, 2014 January 27 by Anton

My bundle of 19 fullerenes is arranged in a face-centred cubic lattice, each ball occupying one of the 24 even-numbered cells of a 4×4×3 array (and parts of the adjacent cells). The spacing of the grid planes is determined by … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematics | 3 Comments

as many as it takes

Posted on Saturday, 2013 November 16 by Anton

allRGB: images in which each of 16 million colors occurs exactly once. (Found at MathPuzzle.) I see I’m not the only one to think of the Hilbert curve idea, but I’ll post two others. In unrelated news, I was surprised … Continue reading →

Posted in Cascadia, eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

it’s all connected

Posted on Saturday, 2013 August 31 by Anton

My old calculus book gives a formula for the curvature of a parametric arc in the plane — that is, an arc defined by two functions (x(t),y(t)) of one variable. For thirty years I didn’t think about the derivation of … Continue reading →

Posted in curve-fitting | Leave a comment

better my computer than me

Posted on Sunday, 2013 March 10 by Anton

My computer ran for eight solid days to extend this table from six rows — (2 3 7), (2 4 5), (3 3 4), (2 3 ∞), (2 ∞ ∞), (∞ ∞ ∞), each of which is (in some sense) … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematics | 3 Comments