Math as Art, inspired by UC Berkeley's Carlo H. Séquin
From a lunch break from The Future of the Forum at the University of
California in Berkeley: Beautiful discoveries carved out of numbers.
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Here is a math problem for you:
Assume that the legislation establishing government control of medical care is passed and that it "brings down the cost of medical care." You pay $500 a year less for your medical care, but the new costs put on employers is passed on to consumers, so that you pay $300 a year more for groceries and $200 a year more for gasoline, while the new mandates put on insurance companies raise your premiums by $300 a year, how much money have you saved?
-Thomas Sowell
Math, like economic facts -> politically inconvenient.
Fuck bookmarks
I've gotten into the habit of reading books without the use of bookmarks and if you know me at all you'll know that I cringe at any crease found in a book – so dog-earing it is not an option. Instead I just try to remember my last page read by coming up with a crazy association between the numbers in the page number. These usually involve taking two of the numbers and getting to the third. Here are a few examples:
84: easy, all I have to remember is that 8 is in the "second"(2) position, and 8/2 = 4
651: 6 and 5 are separated by 1
265: 25 = 5^2 and 6 - 5 = 1 and 25 + 1 = 26 (i.e. 265 = (5^2) + (6-5) [prepended to] 5)
850: there are 3 numbers total and 5+3 = 8
135: just remember 3 and 5 and that 3 is in the middle of their product (i.e. 3 is in the middle of 3*5)
That last one was the last page I just finished reading in my current book (Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe) but the rest I had randomly generated by Ruby.
If you'll notice most of these associations are really loose and contrived and therefore probably more difficult to remember than the actual number. I think that just the act of coming up with the associations is what really helps it stick. Also I don't usually read books with more than 1,000 pages, so my contrivances are limited to dealing with 3-digit numbers. Another thing that helps is that one usually has a fairly good idea of what page they were on. I wont think I'm on page 800 when I've only been reading the book for a few days. And of course you only have to remember the number/association for a few days at most if you read regularly.
I'm always trying to make myself rely on less things if possible (and fun). This is just one way I get it done.
I Love Wikipedia
In mathematics, Stirling numbers of the second kind, together with Stirling numbers of the first kind, are one of the two types of Stirling numbers.
Isn't it a truly beautiful definition?
Secret math of fly eyes could overhaul robot vision
from wired.com:
Secret Math of Fly Eyes Could Overhaul Robot Vision
““We can build a system that works perfectly well, inspired by biology, without having a complete understanding of how the components interact. It’s a non-linear system,” said David O’Carroll, a computational neuroscientist who studies insect vision at Australia’s University of Adelaide. “The number of computations involved is quite small. We can get an answer using tens of thousands of times less floating-point computations than in traditional ways.”
The best-known of these is the Lucas-Kanade method, which calculates yaw — up-and-down, side-to-side motion changes — by comparing, frame by frame, how every pixel in a visual field changes. It’s used for steering and guidance in many experimental unmanned vehicles, but its brute-force approach requires lots of processing power, making it impractical in smaller systems.
In order to make smaller flying robots, researchers would like to find a simpler way of processing motion. Inspiration has come from the lowly fly, which uses just a relative handful of neurons to maneuver with extraordinary dexterity. And for more than a decade, O’Carroll and other researchers researchers have painstakingly studied the optical flight circuits of flies, measuring their cell-by-cell activity and turning evolution’s solutions into a set of computational principles.
[...] “A laptop computer uses tens of watts of power. Implementing what we’ve developed can be done with chips that consume just a fraction of a milliwatt,” said O’Carroll.“
Math
Check out this website I found at ixl.com
Students, this fun activity will help you to practice identifying place value in numbers less than 100!
Soutenance
I just came home from the thesis defense of my friend in the lab. It
was very clear, even for me who knows very little French. I'm glad
that he did well in his defense today.
thesis defense. :(
