Additionally, here are some earlier writings:
2015/01/05 - Publically Sharing Links
Read more: Publically Sharing Links
2014/12/14 - Learning Times Tables
Should primary school students be drilled on their times tables?
Read more: Learning Times Tables
2014/12/12 - Graceful Degradation
I first learned about graceful degradation from a colleague. He prefaced his story by saying that good people learn from their mistakes, but the best people learn from other people's mistakes. This is a bit like the saying in aviation circles that a good landing is one you can walk away from, an excellent landing is when they can use the 'plane again ...
Read more: Graceful Degradation
2014/11/22 - Diagramming Maths Topics
An impossible task, but wouldn't it be useful to have some sort of diagram of topics in maths, connected somehow to show the links between topics? How could such a diagram been created? How could it be explored? How could it be dynamic? Maintainable? Usable?
Read more: Diagramming Maths Topics
2014/08/26 On The Rack
When travelling, I usually go as light as possible. Certainly when travelling by plane I try to go "hand luggage only", and when doing various mini-tours of talks, etc., I try to travel with just a single, small backpack. Sometimes it's not possible, but I usually manage. Here's a story of one time when this had unexpected consequences ...
Read more: On The Rack
2014/08/11 Square Root By Long Division
The other day someone asked:
Read more: Square Root By Long Division
2014/05/23 Beyond The Boundary
In which we show that 1+2+4+8+16+... is not equal to -1, and how that might both surprise us, and not surprise us.
Read more: Beyond The Boundary
2014/05/03 Fill In The Gaps
Recently I had an interesting conversation on twitter, insofar as one can have a conversation at all in that medium. It started with the following perfectly reasonable question ...
Q> Sorry for what may be a stupid question, Q> but sin(x)/x has a limit of 1 as x -> 0, Q> so does it not cross x=0 at 1?
Read more: Fill In The Gaps
2014/04/24 Software Checklist
During the second World War, fighter pilots would scramble to take off. As they bumbled down the grass runway, engines open at full throttle, trying to take off on a short, bumpy track with a full load of fuel and ammunition, their heart would stop when the engine mis-fired. Was the fuel mix too rich, or too lean? They'd look at the control for the mixture and wonder which way to turn it. The right way would increase engine power and make lift-off straight-forward. The wrong way would lose power, and there was rarely enough time to fix the mistake.
Read more: Software Checklist
2013/02/10 NASA Space Crews
I was watching some documentaries on the NASA space missions, and I started to realise that in the Apollo missions many of the crew were experienced, but some were not. This made sense, because you need to train new people and give them experience, but equally, it was important that some experienced members be on each mission.
So I drew a diagram - see what patterns you see.
Read more: NASA Space Crews ...
2012/11/06 The Birthday Paradox
If there are just two people in a room, it's very unlikely that they will have the same birthday. On the other hand, if there are 1000 people in a room, it's absolutely certain that there will be shared birthdays, as there simply aren't enough days to go round without repeats. So as we add people to a room the chances of a shared birthday rise from 0 to 1, and at some point will pass through the halfway mark.
When? And what does this have to do with cryptographic hash spaces?
Read more: The Birthday Paradox ...
2012/04/17 The Trapezium Conundrum
Clear, precise, unambiguous and useful definitions are hard to come by in the real world. In maths we have the luxury of creating definitions that we want, and then chasing down the consequences. If the definition doesn't produce what we want, we can change it.
But even things, things aren't always as easy as we might hope.
Read more: The Trapezium Conundrum ...
2012/02/20 Revisiting The Ant
So here's what's happening:
Read more: Revisiting The Ant ...
2012/02/09 The Ant And The Rubber Band
There's a 1 metre long rubber band, and an ant, standing on it at one end. The ant starts walking along it at a speed of 1 cm/min. Every minute the rubber band is stretched (uniformly and instantaneously) to be one metre longer. The question is this: Will the ant ever get to the far end?
Read more: The Ant And The Rubber Band ...
2011/12/20 Irrationals Exist
For this post I thought I'd have a quick diversion into talking about the so-called "Real Numbers." Upon reflection, however, I found that there was so much I wanted to say that there was no way to fit it sensibly into a single post. So instead I'll put some preliminary comments here, and then expand on them later.
In particular, I'll give an explicit proof that for every interval you choose of non-zero length, there is an irrational in it.
Read more: Irrationals Exist ...
2011/11/15 Multiple Choice Probability Puzzle
The immediate thought is - there are four options, so if I pick one at random then each has a one in four chance of being chosen. That means the answer is 1/4, or 25%.
But that doesn't work ...
Read more: Multiple Choice Probability Puzzle ...
2011/10/28 Random Eratosthenes
Why do people think of the primes as somehow being "random"? What does that mean? How can we investigate?
In this post I'll talk about a way of generating primes, and then see what happens when we toss in some randomness, just for fun.
Read more: Random Eratosthenes ...
2011/09/13 Wrapping Up Square Dissection
We now have five valid dissections, and one "dissection" that might be regarded as invalid. So what do we mean by "a piece" and just how many dissections are there?
Read more: Wrapping Up Square Dissection ...
2011/08/08 Dissecting A Square Part 2
So we return to the square. It's simple enough to cut it up into identical pieces so that all the pieces touch the centre.
But in how many ways?
I rapidly got 5 (or 6, depending on a technicality), and I started to wonder about a proof that 5 (or 6) was all of them. I posted a badly worded question on an internet forum, and rightly got flamed for it, but in the answers was a shock.
There was an infinite family of solutions.
Read more: Dissecting A Square Part 2 ...
2011/07/26 Dissecting A Circle
So last time I talked about the three possibilities we have when we dissect a square:
What about the other possibilities?
Read more: Dissecting A Circle ...
2011/06/01 Dissecting A Square (Part 1)
Some time ago, mid-2009 I think, I was given a challenge that I found fascinating. You might choose to have a think about it, and here is the way I introduce it to people:
2011/05/24 An Oddity In Tennis
(Part 3 of Decision Trees In Games)
... in which we discover that the techniques we've developed over the past two posts lead to an apparent anomaly in the behaviour of the scoring system, and ask "Why is it so?"
2011/05/18 Decision Tree For Tennis
(Part 2 of Decision Trees In Games)
In the last post we analysed a simple "First to Two" (or "Best of Three") game of probability. More interesting, and more difficult, is something like tennis, which adds the complication of "Deuce." In tennis, the winner of a game is the person who not only has at least 4 points, but is also at least 2 ahead of their opponent. When you each have 3 points the next winner of a point doesn't win the game - they need to get two in front.
2011/05/15 - Decision Trees In Games (Part 1)
A fairly standard exercise in probability is to ask who, under a given scoring system, will win a game given the probability of each move. For example, suppose we toss a coin, and I get a point for every head, and you get a point for every tail. Winner is first to 2.
It's easy if the coin is fair, because the game is symmetrical. It's easy if it's a two headed coin, or a two tailed coin, because then the winner is certain.
But if the coin shows head with probability p (and tail with probability q=1-p ) then it's harder.
Read more: Decision Trees In Games (Part 1)
2011/05/09 - A Matter Of Convention
A friend of mine, James Grime, is becoming quite well known both for his mathematics presentations, as well as for his videos on YouTube. He's really quite good, but recently he complained that he was getting a lot of requests to settle a matter. He didn't really want to talk about it, but it's this:
What is the value of 6/2(2+1) ??
Read more: A Matter Of Convention
2011/04/21 - Do You Nourish Or Tarnish
There are people I know who are like the sunshine in the morning of a Spring day. They illuminate, warm, nourish, and make one's life better.
There are others, though, who aren't like that. They see only what's theirs, ...
Read more: Do You Nourish Or Tarnish
2011/04/18 - Binary Search Reconsidered
"Binary Search" was made popular as an interesting test problem by Jon Bentley in his book Programming Pearls. There he says that it's an interesting problem, and baits the hook ...
I was stupid - I claimed: "There is a simpler invariant and simpler code that together have a few advantages" ...
Read more: Binary Search Reconsidered
2011/04/14 - Two Equals Four
Here's a cool puzzle.
Consider the equation and suppose we want to solve it for x.
Because the exponential tower is infinite, we can also write it as
But the part in brackets is the same as the whole, and hence is equal to 2. Thus we have 2=x2
Read more: Two Equals Four
2011/04/11 - The Lost Property Office
Last week I gave a talk in Stroud. Well, three talks, actually. Two were my regular juggling talk, and one was a maths talk. They seemed to go well, with lots of nice comments from both the teachers and the students.
It was a warm, sunny day, so as my host was going to be busy for an hour or so before taking me back to the station (an arrangement we had agreed in advance, and with which I was perfectly content) I decided to walk, ...
Read more: The Lost Property Office
2011/04/05 - The Forgiving User Interface
Read more: The Forgiving User Interface
2011/04/03 - Setting Up RSS
After saying that I would be Withdrawing From Hacker News I posted a note there saying so, and pointing people at my "blog" in case they wanted to read what I write in the future. Then someone asked if I could set up an RSS feed, so I've attempted to do so.
Read More: Setting Up RSS
2011/04/03 - Withdrawing From Hacker News
866 days ago I came across some essays by Paul Graham. I was interested in and impressed by some of the articles, but also realised that they were interconnected. To explore their interconnectedness I extracted all the links between them, graphed the connections, and computed a Google-like ranking. The results weren't actually that interesting because the essays don't cross-link much, but I sent them to Graham in case he thought they were interesting or useful. Maybe he would put more cross-links in, which might make the essays more of a resource than they already were.
Slightly surprisingly, I got a reply, in which he suggested that I submit the link to Hacker News. I'd never heard of Hacker News, but had a look, thought it interesting, and submitted the link.
Read more: Withdrawing From Hacker News
2011/04/02 - Colin's Blog
I've been rethinking and reorganising my "blog". I've decided that each entry should be a separate page, and then the pages can chain forward, backward, and give a list of recent posts.
We'll see how that goes.
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