MetaFilter posts tagged with numbers and mathematics

3D Mapping

netbros — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:44:55 -0800

Durango Bill's Home Page. With topics that include: 3D end-to-end tour of the Grand Canyon, the origin and formation of the Colorado River, and examples of river systems that cut through mountain ranges instead of taking easier routes around them in Ancestral Rivers of the World. But if geology and 3D mapping isn't your thing, Bill also entertains and informs with his evaluations of creationism and religious cultists, an energy/oil analysis, gaming probability analysis, graph and number theories and applied mathematics. Durango Bill is a busy dude.

The H&FJ Institute for Unapplied Mathematics

netbros — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:27:28 -0800

Joe Palca, a science correspondent for NPR's Morning Edition, was meditating on the best way to convey the magnitude of the world's largest known prime number, 2^43112609-1. He contacted H&FJ at Typography.com to discuss the implications of typesetting a number with more than twelve million digits. Crunching of numbers and fonts ensued.

Operation Kaprekar

fatllama — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 22:19:42 -0800

Mysterious number 6174. An excellent recreational math article.

It's all a numbers game...

Rothko — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 14:50:05 -0800

Notable properties of specific numbers: From Planck time to milli-millillions and myriads.

Lost and Found

luriete — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 10:42:29 -0800

Not Lost After All Given recent posts proving and disproving various meanings of the ongoing numbers references on the television program Lost, I figured that some of you would be interested that a person over on Flickr seems to have a much better explanation: they're simply geographic coordinates.

Number Spirals

jjray — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 09:40:12 -0800

Number Spirals: Coincidences of order. "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

vacapinta — Mon, 15 Apr 2002 23:16:37 -0800

Can you stump the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences? Every identifiable sequence known to man, including:

Name: Busy Beaver problem: maximal number of steps that an n-state Turing machine can make on an initially blank tape before eventually halting.
Comment: The sequence grows faster than any computable function of n, and so is non-computable.
Keywords: hard,huge,nice,nonn,bref

If your sequence does not appear there, you might want to try the Super Seeker.

stevridie — Sun, 08 Jul 2001 16:06:37 -0800

Never be stuck without numbers ane twa thrie fower fyve sax seiven aicht nyne ten < Count to ten in scottish and over 4000 other languages.

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.

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!

talos — Wed, 14 Feb 2001 07:36:55 -0800

Prime Time. A prime is a whole number divisible only by itself and 1. In Aesthetics of the prime sequence one can hear primes, view primes (here also) and test for primes. Quite interesting and not just for math geeks...

alan — Fri, 24 Mar 2000 13:09:53 -0800

Call me Ishmael. Now all I need is a group of blind followers.