Many mathematicians enjoy puzzles – and digging in to interesting code. Simon’s Puzzle collection is an open source collection of puzzles that any mathematician would enjoy:
Continue reading “Puzzles – an open-source collection”Testing solutions to the 100-prisoners puzzle.
Both Matt Parker and the Youtube Veritasium channel have reviewed the surprising best practice for the 100 prisoners puzzle. The puzzle is a way to find a solution that will let the prisoners win with the most probability. If you have not seen this already please see the video here before some spoilers below.
Continue reading “Testing solutions to the 100-prisoners puzzle.”Happy Pi Day 2022
Once again it is Pi day, a great time to make pie – or order a Pizza or Pie (check if your local restaurants have a special Pi day deal 🙂 )
This year Pi day comes on a Monday, which hasn’t happened since 2016! There are some interesting tricks to calculating what any given day of the week was, and I’ll leave you with a video that James Grime published with some math tricks for the day of the week for any given date:
Continue reading “Happy Pi Day 2022”Happy Twosday! and a Surprising Pi trick
In Ben Sparks’ video he shows a very interesting trick. On a decimal angle calculator run:
sin(1/5555)
If your calculator has more than the standard Ubuntu calculator’s digits of accuracy you could add even more repeating 5’s. The answer is approximately PI with extra zeros…
0.000003142
Since today is Twosday (2-22-2022 in any date format), here is a similar Tuesday math trick for the Python console:
from math import sin
sin(22/700000.0)
It is also .0003142… or approximately Pi!
Continue reading “Happy Twosday! and a Surprising Pi trick”Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history
In the chapter The Long Tail of the Law, in Alex Bellos’ book The Grapes of Math, he shows some different statistical patterns that share the same properties:
Continue reading “Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history”Sum/product of consecutive numbers and other math shortcuts
If you have studied some of the old SAT questions at some point you may have gone through questions like –
4 consecutive numbers sum to 166. What is the product of the numbers? or…
3 consecutive even numbers sum to X. What is their product?
The way the tutors and the online tutorials show seems to always be to algebraically solve this – for example 4 consecutive numbers would solve x+x+1+x+2+x+3 = 166, collect terms and solve…
However there is another way that works for this and works for other similar problems.
Continue reading “Sum/product of consecutive numbers and other math shortcuts”In search of the best scientific calculator for Librem Phone/Pinephone
While many apps do run on Librem 5 phone, there are many yet to be fully working on the small screen. In this post we explore the various calculator apps for Linux and see which might best work as a student/engineer’s go-to calculator:
Continue reading “In search of the best scientific calculator for Librem Phone/Pinephone”Slide rule enters the 21st century
Some time ago I came across this online tool in a newsletter article – this is a very cool slide-rule-emulator that will not just let you move two slides, but actually slide it for you as you run an equivalent digital calculator calculation to the right!
If you haven’t ever used a slide rule before, it works on properties of logarithms, and the principle that log(a)+log(b) = log(a*b). Now it wouldn’t be very interesting to just have two normal rulers together, as sliding and adding would just let you do problems like 5+5 = 10 or 50+50 = 100 if you scale the numbers. With logarithmic scale, the spacings are off and it allows you to do multiplication in adding the numbers.
Continue reading “Slide rule enters the 21st century”One more way to fight COVID-19… with your computer!
There’s a lot of computing power into finding a solution for COVID-19, and Digital Ocean just featured a new way to get involved – make your own droplet (virtual computer) to run distributed computations.
Continue reading “One more way to fight COVID-19… with your computer!”Analyzing Scott Flansburg’s Nines Trick
There’s an old math trick that goes like so – choose any number… say 171…. add the digits and subtract.
171-9 = 162
Take its sum of digits and subtract them…
162 – 9 = 153
Take its sum of digits and subtract them… Continue reading “Analyzing Scott Flansburg’s Nines Trick”