Category Archives: mathematics

four million colors

You may know from The Art of Computer Programming §4.1 (citing W. Penney, 1965) that, just as any positive real number can be represented by a bit string in base 2, any complex number can be represented by a bit … Continue reading

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fun with eigenvectors

After installing that matrix math library, I spent a week’s evenings pushing several abstract graphs through my “topological coordinates” program and finding, to my lack of complete shock, that none of them had any neat three-dimensional embedding. Then I tried … Continue reading

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Finagle’s Law

I hoped to have some new math pictures for you (or at least for me) today, but my attempts to install a code library that I need have come to nothing. The makefile invokes gcc with options that version 3.3 … Continue reading

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les maths sont universels

Philippe “Goulu” cites my sphere arrangements page and discusses the subject thereof, in French.

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Jenn

New toy! Fritz Obermeyer’s Jenn makes stereographic projections of most of the convex uniform tilings of the hypersphere; of the 64 Conway-Guy polychora only four (whose construction is somewhat anomalous) are missing. I downloaded the generic Unix version and easily … Continue reading

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beauty’s where you find it

I mis-heard some trivial question as “What is Hamming music?” For some of us, the name Hamming is strongly associated with information theory, and so I imagined that “Hamming music” must be algorithmic composition using error-correcting principles. And that got … Continue reading

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finite menu

One episode of Murder in Suburbia involves a mate-swapping club of four couples. (In this case, sex provides the opportunity but not the motive.) It occurred to me in my insomnia that, instead of drawing names from a hat, for … Continue reading

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