brainwagon

A couple days ago, one of my Twitter or Facebook friends (sadly, I forgot who, comment if it was you, and I’ll give you credit) pointed out this awesome page: Reversing Sinclair’s amazing 1974 calculator hack – half the ROM of the HP-35 It documented an interesting calculator made by Sinclair in the 1970s. It […]

Inspired by the KnitYak Kickstarter, I thought I would code up a simple Python program that could generate the same sort of patterns that are used in the scarves in the video. If you want to learn more about the mathematical theory of these cellular automata, google for keywords like “1D” “cellular automata” and “steve […]

Use the “bc” arbitrary precision calculator you can probably find (or install easily) on your Linux box. > bc -l bc 1.06.95 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty’. scale=50 4*a(1) 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937508 User input is in bold. the scale […]

Happy Albert Einstein’s birthday! And we are just a few minutes away (in our time zone anyway) from 9:26. Huzzah! I’m going to celebrate by making Shepard’s Pi(e) for dinner.

Over on Facebook, fellow Pixarian Arun pointed out this story on a problem I encountered in my undergraduate schooling as “The Marriage Problem”, which I also heard of as “The Secretary Problem”. The idea is that you are supposed to find a wife (or secretary) out of a list of $n$ possibles. Each one is […]

A friend of mine was working on a programming exercise, and it turns it out was based on a chunk of math which I thought I should have seen before, but either have not seen or have forgotten. It’s basically that the products of all primes less than some number n is less than or […]

This is a math/geeky/computer post of something relatively simple, but it arose in the wild in a program that I wrote several years ago, and when I saw it again, it confused me, and I spent a bit of time thinking about it, and I thought I might just write it up. If math/geeky/computer stuff […]

I’m a bit of a math geek. I have been periodically fascinated by the factoring of large numbers, which plays such an important role in modern cryptography algorithms like RSA. I’ve coded a few of the non-trivial factorization algorithms, such as Pollard-rho, but haven’t done a whole lot with it. It mostly remains just a […]

If you haven’t heard of Theo Jansen and his incredible walking machines, I can’t do them justice with words. Check this out: His work is accessible from strandbeest.com. I find his creations amazingly cool. And others do as well, even hamsters (although cats seem less impressed): But while I’ve found these things fascinating, I didn’t […]

I’ve been pretty interested in codes of all sort, both the cryptographic codes and the codes that are used to provide error detection and correction. While I’ve played around quite a bit with convolutional codes, I haven’t really every bothered to develop more than a cursory understanding of the Reed-Solomon error correcting codes which have […]

Today is π-day (3/14) as well as Albert Einstein’s birthday. I was trying to get inspired to produce something pi related, so I scanned my bookshelves for the kind of fun recreational mathematics books that provide the raw grist for my geek mill. I found a copy of Peter Beckmann’s A History of Pi, which […]

Courtesy of Phil Harvey’s Puzzle « Programming Praxis, I discovered that the numbers from 1..16 can be partitioned into two 8 element sets, with these nifty identities! 2+3+5+8+9+12+14+15 == 1+4+6+7+10+11+13+16 22+32+52+82+92+122+142+152 == 12+42+62+72+102+112+132+162 23+33+53+83+93+123+143+153 == 13+43+63+73+103+113+133+163 There has to be a good way to use this to make a cool geometric puzzle as well.\ Bonus: […]

I was standing in Tom’s office, and asked him a simple probability question (and a timely one, given the World Series): If the odds of a particular team winning against their opponent is some probability p, what are the odds that they will win a 7 game series? If you had any probability at all, […]

For some reason, I never do much reading about baseball during the season itself. But as the World Series approaches its end (still hoping for a game seven) I have started to dust off some of my reading materials. A couple years ago, I mentioned this work by Lawrence Brown on this blog, but the […]

Well, it wasn’t so much a difficulty with the Hilbert transform as a difficulty with my understanding. But with the help of my good friend Tom, my understanding was soon put right, and I thought it might make an interesting (in other words, horribly boring to anyone but myself) post, and at the very least, […]