MetaFilter posts tagged with math and brokenlink

It all started with rabbits

archimago — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 08:59:07 -0800

Fun with Fibonacci numbers. So you say you scored 130 on yesterday's IQ test, did ya?

Get your calc on

walrus — Sun, 23 Mar 2003 10:56:23 -0800

Webcalc solves over 100 different equations online.

tss — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 23:22:10 -0800

Paul Bourke of Auckland has an excellent set of elegant and informative webpages for the kind of math you look at. Even if math perplexes you, his pages are still quite pretty and often make for interesting reading regardless. Every place I've worked between college and now, Paul has given me pages that nicely explained how to do somthing I needed to do and even personal help on occasion. Here's to you, Paul!

Shadowkeeper — Wed, 31 Oct 2001 10:53:29 -0800

Candy Bar Math A Brunching Shuttlecock link and almost certainly a double post. But what the hell: let's gorge on candy.

bicyclingfool — Mon, 30 Apr 2001 22:37:54 -0800

LavaRand ...harnessing the power of Lava Lite® lamps to generate truly random numbers....

That's a bold statement, but who am I to doubt the power of the lava lamp. The mathematical purist may disagree with the "truely random" part, but this geek speak convinced me that LavaRand can handle all my random number needs.

frednorman — Tue, 10 Apr 2001 07:56:07 -0800

School's mathematics don't add up! PS 234, a primary school in TriBeCa, is at the forefront of the revolution in math instruction being carried out in more than half of New York City's schools. The district's approach to math instruction follows an egalitarian theory called "constructivist math," which is the idea that children shouldn't learn basic techniques for adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying. Rather, emphasis is placed on "feeling good about numbers" etc. Said one angry parent, "The idea that the home has to be turned into the school because the school is the testing ground for inane programs - that's frightening." And leading university mathematicians have joined parent groups in denouncing the method. All things concidered, is it right for schools to use children as guinea pigs in this manner?

Skot — Thu, 15 Mar 2001 12:40:07 -0800

Mathematician Bums Out Entire Scientific Community His "Omega" number--infinite and incalculable--guts hopes for pure mathematics, physicists' hopes for a Theory of Everything, and is just in general kind of bafflingly cool. Builds on the whole Godel/Turing foundation of hopelessness!

redleaf — Wed, 07 Feb 2001 14:42:51 -0800

Americans suck at math. Mathematician trade deficit ensues... I only find this article interesting because of a talk with my math teacher recently about how most math teachers these days are foriegners, although she isn't, and not that foriegners are bad. But I'm curious if this a bad problem in today's economy or not? Or if this is a problem? What country is good at math? India and China? That's where most of the Silicon Valley CEO's workers are from these days. Or is that political, financial? I don't know. Do you know?

rschram — Tue, 24 Oct 2000 09:19:42 -0800

Hey, kids! Statistics is cool! (Amazing introduction to the concept of estimation, and error computing.)

palegirl — Wed, 24 May 2000 20:11:26 -0800

The Poincaré Conjecture: If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the the surface of the apple is ‘simply connected,’ but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out be be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since.

...but if you can prove it, [or any of six other 'millenium prize problems'] the clay mathematics institute wants to line your pockets with $1M