Sunday Function
Category: Sunday Function
Big O!
Posted by Matt Springer at 1:35 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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
Big O!
Posted by Matt Springer at 1:35 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
All right, here's a fun one. It usually comes as part of a story. The story as told is mostly true, though a few details have been a little fudged by the winds of history. It goes like this: when...
Posted by Matt Springer at 12:34 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
Find the function, with a prize!
Posted by Matt Springer at 12:56 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
The vast majority of the functions we've talked about over all these Sundays have been ones that are expressible as a relationship between two numbers x and y. Sometimes the relationship is simple, sometimes it's fairly complicated. Mostly though, we...
Posted by Matt Springer at 8:36 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
Anybody heard of the idea of The Singularity? Roughly, it goes like this: technological progress builds on itself, and this self-reinforcing feedback loop is eventually going to come to a head where humanity makes a quantum leap into an unknowable...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
I think we've developed a nice theme over the last few weeks, gradually working our way through a less well-behaved function - the triangle wave - and trying to find various series expansions for it. "Well-behaved" is kind of a...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
Sorry for the two-day delay. The personal business to which I alluded kept me out until yesterday morning, delaying this post until today. I hope it's decent for all that! This week, the same function as last week. There's nothing...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
There's an interesting book I'm working on called The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, by historian Brian Ward-Perkins. He argues (against a prominent modern school of thought) that Rome did indeed fall rather than merely change, and...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
All right ladies and gentlemen, take out your calculators. Punch in the number 4. Whack the square root button. What do you get? Unless I am badly mistaken, you're going to get the number 2. As you probably remember, the...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Sunday Function
You know what's gonna happen? I'll tell you what's gonna happen. Troops are now forming behind the line of trees. When they come out, they'll be under enemy long-range artillery fire. Solid shot. Percussion. Every gun they have. Troops will...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:13 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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