Racetrack is a game with
very simple rules which nonetheless does a surprisingly good job of simulating the acceleration, braking, and handling of a race car. It can teach not only about inertia and kinematics, but also about optimal racing lines. Racetrack can be played with nothing more than a piece of graph paper and a pen, but there is also an online implementation called
Vector Racer.
posted by 256
on Aug 11, 2012 -
42 comments
"
MathB.in is a website meant for sharing snippets of mathematical text with others on the web. This is a
pastebin for mathematics… The post can be composed in a mixture of plain text,
LaTeX and HTML."
posted by grouse
on Jul 26, 2012 -
5 comments
Morton and Vicary on the Categorified Heisenberg Algebra - "In quantum mechanics, position times momentum does not equal momentum times position! This sounds weird, but it's connected to a very simple fact. Suppose you have a box with some balls in it, and you have the magical ability to create and annihilate balls. Then there's one more way to create a ball and then annihilate one, than to annihilate one and then create one. Huh? Yes: if there are, say, 3 balls in the box to start with, there are 4 balls you can choose to annihilate after you've created one but only 3 before you create one..."
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Jul 21, 2012 -
78 comments
"The calculator itself is just over 250x200x100 blocks. It contains 2 6-digit BCD number selectors, 2 BCD-to-binary decoders, 3 binary-to-BCD decoders, 6 BCD adders and subtractors, a 20 bit (output) multiplier, 10 bit divider, a memory bank and additional circuitry for the graphing function." Yes, someone built a
working scientific calculator, in Minecraft.
posted by jbickers
on Mar 21, 2012 -
46 comments
NumberADay -
Every working day, we post a number and offer a selection of that number’s properties.
posted by Wolfdog
on Jan 11, 2012 -
30 comments
An "Exciting Guide to Probability Distributions" from the University of Oxford:
part 1,
part 2. (Two links to PDFs)
posted by JoeXIII007
on Dec 15, 2011 -
17 comments
For twenty years, the fastest known algorithm to multiply two n-by-n matrices, due to Coppersmith and Winograd, took a leisurely O(n^2.376) steps. Last year, though, buried deep in his PhD thesis, Andy Stothers discussed an improvement to O(n^2.374) steps. And today, Virginia Vassilevska Williams of Berkeley and Stanford, released a breakthrough paper [pdf] that improves the matrix-multiplication time to a lightning-fast O(n^2.373) steps. [via] [more inside]
posted by albrecht
on Nov 29, 2011 -
50 comments
Pythagasaurus is the fabled Tyrannosaurus practiced in the skills of trigonometry and long division. Apparently he knows all eight numbers.
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Nov 11, 2011 -
9 comments
One way to
measure corporate fraud is look at reported numbers and see if they follow
Benford's law - number sets that are manipulated usually deviate from Benford's law. A
recent analysis of all public companies over the past 50 years has shown a steady upward deviation, strongly suggesting there is more corporate fraud now than ever before (peaked in 2008).
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Oct 13, 2011 -
41 comments
Who's Afraid of the Seven Times Table? Ernst Kummer, one of the great mathematicians of the late 1800s, was hopeless at arithmetic. He was giving an advanced maths lecture and in the middle of a complicated calculation he needed to know what six times seven was. “Um ... six times seven is ... six times seven . . .” A student put up his hand: “41, Professor.” Kummer chalked 41 on the blackboard. “No, no, Professor!” shouted another. “It’s 44!” Kummer gave the students a quizzical look. “Come, come, gentlemen. It can’t be both. It must be either one or the other!” [more inside]
posted by storybored
on Sep 27, 2011 -
168 comments
"Perhaps twenty or thirty people in England may be expected to read this book." G.H. Hardy's review of Whitehead and Russell's
Principia Mathematica, published in the Times Literary Supplement 100 years ago last week. "The time has passed when a philosopher can afford to be ignorant of mathematics, and a little perseverance will be well rewarded. It will be something to learn how many of the spectres that have haunted philosophers modern mathematics has finally laid to rest."
posted by escabeche
on Sep 12, 2011 -
29 comments
