What's all this, then?

Introduction Python is of course one of the world’s currently most popular languages, and there are plenty of statistics to show it.

Just recently there was a news item about a solo explorer being the first Australian to reach the Antarctic “Pole of Inaccessibility”.

I am not an analyst, so I find the sums of infinite series quite mysterious.

Runge’s phenomenon says roughly that a polynomial through equally spaced points over an interval will wobble a lot near the ends.

Introduction and the problem The SIR model for spread of disease was first proposed in 1927 in a collection of three articles in the Proceedings of the Royal Society by Anderson Gray McKendrick and William Ogilvy Kermack; the resulting theory is known as…

So this goes back quite some time to the recent Australian Federal election on May 18.

Here is an interactive version of this diagram: [!

A general cubic polynomial has the form \[ ax^3+bx^2+cx+d \] but a general cubic equation can have the form \[ x^3+ax^2+bx+c=0. \] We can always divide through by the coefficient of \(x^3\) (assuming it to be non-zero) to obtain a monic equation; that is,…

Here we show how a Tschirnhausen transformation can be used to solve a quartic equation.

The date January 26 is one of immense current debate in Australia.

Recently we have seen senators behaving in ways that seem stupid, or contrary to accepted public opinion.

This evening I saw the Australia Brandenburg Orchestra with guest soloist Lixsania Fernandez, a virtuoso player of the viola da gamba, from Cuba.

Here’s an example of a transportation problem, with information given as a table: Demands 300 360 280 340 220 750 100 150 200 140 35 Supplies 400 50 70 80 65 80 350 40 90 100 150 130 This is an example of a balanced, non-degenerate transportation problem.

For my elementary linear programming subject, the students (who are all pre-service teachers) use Excel and its Solver as the computational tool of choice.

For years I have been running a blog and other web apps on a VPS running Ubuntu 14.04 and Apache - a standard LAMP system.

There’s a celebrated elementary result which claims that: There are irrational numbers \(x\) and \(y\) for which \(x^y\) is rational.

Here’s an example of a coloured tetrahedron: hello <div oncontextmenu="return false;" id="viewerContext" style = "width:640px;height:470px;" design-url="tetrahedron.jscad"></div> <div id="tail" style="display: none;"> <div id="statusdiv"…

These are a class of root-finding methods; that is, for the numerical solution of a single nonlinear equation, developed by Alston Scott Householder in 1970.

The Joukowksy Transform is an elegant and simple way to create an airfoil shape.

This was a comedy sketch initially performed in the revue “Clowns in Clover” which had its first performance at the Adelphi Theatre in London on December 1, 1927.

I recently came across some nice material on John Cook’s blog about equations that described eggs.

JSXGraph is a graphics package deveoped in Javascript, and which seems to be tailor-made for a static blog such as this.

When I was teaching the binomial theorem (or, to be more accurate, the binomial expansion) to my long-suffering students, one of them asked me if there was a trinomial theorem.

I’ve been using wordpress as my blogging platform since I first started, about 10 years ago.

Election mapping A few weeks ago there was a by-election in my local electorate (known as an electoral division) of Batman here in Australia.

Presentations are a modern bugbear.

Programming the Vigenère cipher is my go-to problem when learning a new language.

On November 18, 2017, a by-election was held in my suburb of Northcote, on account of the death by cancer of the sitting member.

Every few years I decide to have a go at using a CAD package for the creation of 3D diagrams and shapes, and every time I give it up.