eon

Posted by tpc at September 3rd, 2010

I used to be a member of MAA but found that it did nothing much for me except I get to issues of American Mathematical Monthly. I would classify that as good to have - something to read when I have spare time but most of the articles are not quite my cup of tea. So I decided to stop my membership after a year. The simple fact is this, as a mathematician not based in US, I do not get most of the benefits of belonging to MAA (likewise AMS.) I don’t get to attend their meetings. So why should I pay normal rates? I’m now considering whether or not to continue my membership of AMS at reciprocity rates.

However, I’ve recently added MAA to my twitter account and I have to say that they do quite a good job of pumping feeds, so much so that I have to pick and choose what I read. For example, there is a very neat article on topology and car-shades.

Posted by tpc at August 27th, 2010

Feature column on AMS website this month, using FFT to quickly multiply two large integers. Yet another useful application of Fourier transform.

Posted by tpc at July 20th, 2010

Recently I had the horrendous realization that I’ve lost whatever little origami skills that I once possessed. I was trying to entertain a bored child on the plane who speaks a little English, and I knew no German save “guten tag”. I thought I would fold a paper crane and I couldn’t!

Anyway, I attended an extremely good talk by Robert Lang about Origami and the connection with mathematics. A fifteen minute version is available here. (The first and last minutes are about the same as the talk, but I didn’t view the 13 minutes in between.)

Posted by tpc at May 18th, 2010

Just announced last week that solutions to the Boltzmann equation was found. It is interesting to note how it can mean quite a different thing if I had written the Boltzmann equation was solved.

Anyway, I know next to nothing about pde, so here’s the announcement.

Posted by tpc at May 11th, 2010

Cool article about Pixar and some applications of harmonic function. Would have been useful last year when I taught the maximum principle but didn’t have much else to say about it.

Moving Remy in Harmony: Pixar’s Use of Harmonic Functions
by David Austin.
via: JohnDCook’s twitter.

Posted by tpc at May 5th, 2010

is a book by Niels Lauritzen that I just checked out. My initial impression is that it is well written and contains many interesting gems. It certainly looked like a good book to teach from, although the topics covered are a little broad and thus I suspect not in enough details for a student struggling to learn abstract algebra.

One of the gems was how a computational number theorist, Thomas R Nicely, nicely found a flaw in Pentium’s floating point unit. The book provided this link to the discoverer’s site and as usual, wikipedia has a nice coverage.

Other gems include Sam Loyd’s 15-puzzle and of course the last chapter on Grobner Bases.

Posted by tpc at February 11th, 2009

The government announced today that Deepavali, a public holiday will have its date changed from 15th November to 17th October, a difference of one whole month. This Indian holiday is based on the lunar calendar and sightings of the moon. Apparently a local mathematician who is into calendars, did the computations and showed the original computation is wrong. Well, at least this time, they listened to the one who knows maths.

Posted by tpc at December 15th, 2008

to the bomb scenario in the Dark Knight. I’m not a game theorist, so I shan’t comment but read this post to form your own opinion.

Posted by tpc at November 7th, 2008

Read something quite cool. Professor Brown from Dalhousie, used fourier transforms to reconstruct a mysterious chord from the Beatles `A Hard Day’s Night’