Tagged: math
2700 Billion Digits of Pi
On December 31st, Fabrice Bellard (founder of FFmpeg) announced that he’d calculated pi to 2,700 billion decimal places. Check out the details here. The coolest thing is that he did it using a single...
The Rosetta Clock
Here’s an applet I wrote that draws clocks in 5 different numeral systems. From the top row down, they are: Binary Skew Binary Ternary Balanced Ternary Decimal The first column is the hours, the...
Skew Binary
Remember my earlier post about balanced ternary? Well, another odd numbering system has been in the news recently. Randall Munroe just published a collection of XKCD comics. The page numbers start out like this:...
Blend Cube
Tom had some geometry homework today which involved calculating the surface area of a unit cube with a 1/3 wide square hole punched through the center of each face. Sort of a level 1...
One Trillion Congruent Numbers
Do you know what congruent numbers are? They are integers which are the areas of rational right triangles. A rational right triangle is a right triangle for which none of the 3 sides are...
Equations of the Undead
At work, we love to see the work that our users are doing with our products. This paper has been a big favorite at the office recently. You can hear an interview with one...
Math Midway
Glen Whitney is trying to create a museum of mathematics. There have been articles about the project recently in the New Yorker, Gelf magazine, and the Daily News. His website for the project is...
Balanced Ternary Clock
Here’s a short clip of a balanced ternary clock I wrote using the MATLAB class I posted the other day. In this clock, the green dots represent 1, the red dots represent –1, and...
Statistics
Arthur Benjamin recently gave a TED talk about changing the focus of math education. The short version is that he thinks the focus should be on getting kids to a solid understanding of statistics...
