Math
Category archives for Math
Dorky Poll: Angular Inclinations
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 6, 2010 I forgot to include an option about this in the previous Dorky Poll, but this is one of the best ways I know to sort out righteous physicists from heathen mathematicians: How do you like your angular coordinates?(polls) Choose wisely.
Dorky Poll: Coordination
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 6, 2010 Today’s lecture in intro mechanics is a whirlwind survey of vectors. While I struggle to clear my head enough to be able to teach this stuff, here’s a Dorky Poll to pass the time: What’s your favorite three-dimensional coordinate system?(survey) This is a strictly classical subject, so please choose only one.
Finding Patterns in Data: Fourier Series
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 3, 2010 Over at Faraday’s Cage, Cherish has a very nice post on Fourier series, following on an earlier post on Fourier transforms in the Transformers movie. She gives a nice definition of the process in the earlier post: A Fourier Transform takes a signal and looks at the waves and then shows us the frequencies of…
Quantization of Books 3: How Many Books Is That?
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 28, 2009 When I saw the data generated by the sales rank tracker Matthew Beckler was kind enough to put together, I joked that I hoped to someday need a logarithmic scale to display the sales rank history of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Thanks to links from Boing Boing, John Scalzi, and Kevin Drum,…
Quantization of Books 2: What Does One Sale Get You?
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 20, 2009 I’ve been playing around with the spiffy sales rank tracker Matthew Beckler wrote, because I’m a great big dork, and enjoy playing with graphs. Here’s a graph of the sales rank vs. time through 2pm EST today (plotted in Excel from the data table at the bottom of the page): As I noted in my…
Volume Packing of Breakfast Cereal
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 25, 2009 We’re working on moving SteelyKid from formula to milk (which isn’t going all that well– dairy seems to make her gassy). This has led me to switch over to cereal in the mornings, since we’re buying milk anyway, which frees up the time otherwise spent waiting for the toaster. Cereal-wise, I tend to alternate between…
Philosophical Poll: Chickens and Eggs, Experiment and Theory
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 21, 2009 I’m halfway through Graham Farmelo’s Dirac biography at the moment, and enjoying it quite a bit. Farmelo cites Dirac as one of the first physicists to evaluate theories on their mathematical beauty, rather than waiting for experiments. This is in stark contrast to his Cambridge colleague Rutherford, who was highly skeptical of abstract theory, and…
Dorky Poll: What Color Is Your Calculator?
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 16, 2009 Prompted by a discussion in another channel, a question for you all: What is your preferred type of calculator? That is, when you’re doing some sort of problem involving math, and reach for a calculator, what do you reach for? What Kind of Calculator Do You Use?(survey software) I think I may have used this…
The Speed of God
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 14, 2009 Over in Twitter-land, Eric Weinstein is visiting the AMNH at the same time as a bunch of Orthodox Jews, and takes the opportunity for a little Q&A: Me: Excuse me, but how is the phylogenetic tree reconciled with Torah. Modern Orthodox Man: Lorentzian time dilation. It’s a head hurter. This is an interesting attempt to…
Grocery Store Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 13, 2009 Dan Meyer, like most people, has long wondered whether there was a good way to predict which check-out line at the grocery store will be the fastest. Unlike most people, he used science to find an answer: “I spent ninety minutes last week just watching, counting, and timing groceries as they slid across a scanner.”…
