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An exploration of physics and the quest to understand our world.
Matt Springer is a graduate student of physics at Texas A&M university. He is also an occasional writer and tinkerer, and he is probably too curious for his own good.
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Category: Sunday Function
A reader asked me about the hyperbolic trig functions, sinh(x) and cosh(x). What are they for, and do they have an intuitive interpretation in physics? That's a pretty good question. After all, most of the time you first meet the...
Posted by Matt Springer at 2:09 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
A while back I was driving in my car listening to the radio and was gobsmacked to hear a song (What's My Name? by Rihanna and Drake) in which the singer's rap involved accurately estimating a square root. Unfortunately it...
Posted by Matt Springer at 9:54 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
On linear maps. Like, actual maps.
Posted by Matt Springer at 4:10 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
In my free time during data acquisition runs and the like, I've been paging through Hardy and Wright's famous textbook An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers. It has something of a legendary reputation among pure math textbooks, and so...
Posted by Matt Springer at 2:59 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
This Christmas I got a little handheld GPS, which I've been using mostly for geocaching. As the device acquires signals from the various satellites dutifully orbiting overhead, it displays your position coordinates and a figure indicating the estimated uncertainty. At...
Posted by Matt Springer at 9:27 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
In pure mathematics there's not too many function studied more than the Riemann zeta function. For reasons of historical tradition, the generic variable name that's usually used is s instead of z. (The function is mostly interesting in terms of...
Posted by Matt Springer at 5:06 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
Most textbooks, especially ones not aimed at college math majors, give a definition of "function" that seems quite intuitive. They'll say something along the lines of: a function is a rule that takes an input x and turns it into...
Posted by Matt Springer at 3:05 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
Here's a straightforward function of two variables, x and y: Its domain is all real x and y, with the single exception of x = y = 0, which would make the denominator 0. But we have experience with functions...
Posted by Matt Springer at 5:30 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
Death and taxes. And dead is dead, but taxes come in a huge panoply of forms. There's property taxes, excise taxes, sin taxes and income taxes. There's gas taxes and sales taxes and VAT taxes (yeah, I know) and death...
Posted by Matt Springer at 3:21 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
If you go to the bank and open a savings account, the banker might tell you about the virtues of compound interest. He may say something like "Even if you never deposit anything, the rate of change of the money...
Posted by Matt Springer at 2:43 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
