“Leibniz’s recipe for determining logarithms in this way is delightfully simple and can easily be carried out in practice using, for example, a cheap necklace pinned to a cardboard box with sewing needles.” So wrote Viktor Blåsjö, in the essay “How to Find the Logarithm of Any Number Using Nothing But a Piece of String,” […]
Tag: math
An Extraordinary Scientist Who Delights in the Mundane
Ig Nobel Prize winner L. Mahadevan is profiled, by Steve Nadis, in Quanta magazine: A Scientist Who Delights in the Mundane Mahadevan uses mathematics and physics to explore commonplace phenomena, showing that many of the objects and behaviors we take for granted, and consequently give little thought to, are quite extraordinary upon closer examination… He […]
You can lead a horse’s ass to wonder, but you can’t make him think
This tiny video, by Gracie Cunningham, is a beautifully subtle example of how to make people laugh, then think. The twitter comment about it, by Alex Turner, is a good example of how you can lead a horse’s ass to wonder, but you can’t make him think. https://twitter.com/i/status/1298372968838508546 Gracie Cunningham was bombarded, on Twitter, with […]
Wild Goose Chase – the math(s)
If you’re earnestly chasing something that can’t tun as fast as you do, a cursory mathematical analysis of the situation can give a reassuring result – you’ll probably catch up with it. (Despite what the Ancient Greek philosopher Zeno might have said about it). But what if the entity being chased knows that it’s being […]