Wednesday, October 29, 2008

13 Random Math Links

Separated into three portion, the nerdy, the funny and the inspirational.

The Nerdy Part:

  1.  1- 1+ 1- 1+ 1 ... = ?. This series seems simple enough, group the equations into two and you get 0. But wait... if you group it as 1 - (1 + 1) - (1 + 1)... you get 1. Then you can look at it geometrically to get 1/2. What is going on here?

    Wikipedia to the rescue...

  2. Put Latex on you website/blog the easy way. You might remember my experiments with Latex on this blog some time ago (the reason I'm not using it here is because it looks bad on this template...). Wouldn't it be nice if to have a perfectly typeset equation on your website? Here's the site:

    http://doc.yourequations.com/

  3. The Equation Solver: You still remember / still have that really stupid teacher who just makes you show all your work even though its just plain stupid? Or maybe you just need a bit of help with your homework? Visit Mathway.com to see their equation solver do ALL the work for you. 

  4. How do you turn a sphere inside out without poking holes? Take a look at this video... no degree in calculus needed...

  5. Solving Sudoku using package management, really cool idea (though not really "math"):
    There are many ways that you could convert a Sudoku problem into a Debian package archive, but here's a particularly simple one that is close to my summary of the rules. Create 9 * 9 * 9 = 729 packages, named cellR.C-V where R stands for row, C for column, and V for value. Each of these packages represents writing the value V in the cell (R, C). To describe the relationships of each cell to the other cells in the problem, we can create several... (then it gets to the nitty gritty stuff...)
  6. Euler's Beautiful Equation: How does an irrational number, an imaginary number, another irrational number can relate to -1? This is just mind boggling.
    Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth. —Benjamin Pierce
    Link

The Funny Part:
  1. Here's a redditer response to their favorite story involving math:
    OK, so this is more involving crypto than math, but whatever. One day I was at a math conference presenting on hash functions. The talk was pretty well attended, and afterward a pretty good looking girl comes up to me and introduces herself. She tells me how she really liked the talk, etc. and shakes my hand. After that she promptly leaves, and I discover that in my hand is a note.

    The note says "Here's my number:" and then it has a bunch of ciphertext. At this point I'm totally stoked, because how rare is it to find a hot girl who comes to math conferences and gives you her number?

    I spent days but couldn't crack the code :(
    Permalink

  2. I guess this isn't truely math, but computers and math are almost the same right? Link

  3. Lose weight by eating ice cream? If you do the math, you'll notice that you get negative calories by eating ice cream due to the specific heat of the ice cream... can you find the error in this post?

  4. Learn calculus in 20 minutes? Yup, this doesn't really go under the nerdy portion as this is quite the funny one. The author doesn't allow embedding so... here's the link!

The Inspirational Part:
  1. How Stephen Hawking learned, live through, and ultimately succeeded with ALS in his life.

  2. Ready for a bash of mathematics? Or just how mathematics is taught in America? Ready to spend some 15 minutes reading a 25 page PDF file? Then take a look here. Seriously though, it's a nice read.

  3. Remember the old story where a young student saw equations on the board and thought they were homework problems, instead they were "unsolvable" equations? Well, here's the actual story.

-runiteking1

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