Updated: 2011-09-26 14:32:05
After a hiatus of several months Dr. Tanton is making videos again. Here are two new ones. Lulu has two children. You are told that at least one of her children is a boy who was born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that her other child is also a boy? The answer will [...]
Updated: 2011-09-22 20:51:58
Only four weeks to go until the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011 in Champaign, Illinois, and in order to help you prepare, the full conference schedule is now available online—fully interactive and customizable.
As of this year, you can create your schedule, network with fellow attendees, arrange meetings with Wolfram staff ...
Updated: 2011-09-22 18:52:13
From Instapundit Math joke from Anna, the bartender and civil engineering student: an infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one tells the bartender he wants a beer. The second one says he wants half a beer. The third one says he wants a fourth of a beer. The bartender puts two [...]
Updated: 2011-09-20 17:29:52
Only 10 more weeks to go until the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011, and we have just added details for nearly 50 talks and interactive sessions to the conference website. We will cover a broad array of topics across mathematics and statistics; finance, business, and social sciences; education; software development; science ...
Updated: 2011-09-20 17:29:49
Things are really moving fast at Wolfram these days. Mathematica 8 introduced 500 new functions and 7 new or extended application areas, including the revolutionary free-form input, Wolfram|Alpha integration, and a direct way to create our groundbreaking Computable Document Format (CDF), which was officially released to the public in ...
Updated: 2011-09-13 16:30:45
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Consider this indefinite integral
Feed it to MATLAB’s symbolic toolbox:
int(1/sqrt(x*(2 - x)))
ans =
asin(x - 1)
Feed it to Mathematica 8.0.1:
Integrate[1/Sqrt[x (2 - x)], x] // InputForm
(2*Sqrt[-2 + x]*Sqrt[x]*Log[Sqrt[-2 + x] + Sqrt[x]])/Sqrt[-((-2 + x)*x)]
Let x=1.2 in both results:
MATLAB's answer evaluates to 0.2014
Mathematica's answer evaluates to -1.36944 + 0.693147 I
Discuss!
Updated: 2011-09-11 16:48:30
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So, you’re the proud owner of a new license for MATLAB’s parallel computing toolbox (PCT) and you are wondering how to get some bang for your buck as quickly as possible. Sure, you are going to learn about constructs such as parfor and spmd but that takes time and effort. Wouldn’t it be nice if [...]
Updated: 2011-09-08 00:15:31
There are many cases where you will build a custom component library and use namespaces, this is what I have found to work the best. Can post step for creating and using a manifest, but there are many links on google. The key to this is using the current Adobe namespaces as not to overwrite and [...]
Updated: 2011-09-06 21:36:50
Here's a great video by Vi Hart that shows a couple of proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. Nothing new in terms of the proofs; they're ones I've seen often. What's clever about Vi's approach is that she uses paper-folding to create the elements of the proof. I like this kinesthetic approach to a couple of [...]
Updated: 2011-09-06 06:12:54
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Matt Tearle has produced a MATLAB version of my Interactive Slinky Thing which, in turn, was originally inspired by a post by Sol over at Playing with Mathematica. Matt adatped the code from some earlier work he did and you can click on the image below to get it. Thanks Matt!
Updated: 2011-09-04 22:17:44
There's a cool article that my wife linked me to, about how Hummingbirds drink. Apparently the thought was that they drink via capillary action, but the models suggested that they should prefer lower sugar solutions than they actually do (high sugar increases the viscosity, so slows the capillary rise). Someone finally set up a high [...]
Updated: 2011-09-03 19:52:36
Great stories. Interesting and challenging problems. Instructive MATLAB code. Lots of physics. That's my in-a-nutshell assessment of Princeton University Press's hot-off-the-press Number-Crunching: Taming Unruly Computational Problems from Mathematical Physics to Science Fiction. Paul Nahin is a great story teller. Some of you might recall my review of an earlier book of Nahin's An Imaginary Tale [...]
Updated: 2011-09-03 05:19:47
Martin Cohen is blogless yet he wants to share his paper, Exceedingly Elementary Proofs That a^(1/n) - 1, n^(1/n) - 1, and (1+1/n)^n - e. I offered a home for the paper. I created a PDF and have placed it here. Martin would love your feedback on the paper. Please leave comments here or contact [...]
Updated: 2011-09-02 23:56:31
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Welcome to August’s ‘A Month of Math Software’ where I look at everything from blog posts about math libraries through to the latest releases. Click here for earlier articles in the series.
Mathematical software packages
Maxima, the venerable (it is based on a 1960s codebase called Macsyma) open source computer algebra package has been upgraded to version [...]
