Walking Randomly

Hi my name is raul gonzalez
i am a senior and prom is right around the corner. I would like to know if there is a formula that i can use to spell out “prom”? I have a TI-89 what mode would i have to be in?? I would like to ask my date in a mathematical way since we are both in the same Calculus class and i thought it would be nice for me to ask her this way. Thank you very much and i hope you can help me.

Mike,

Love your blog! I actually wasted tons of time I need to be studying for midterms on the spiral circle post a while ago (it was fun though). I need your help. I use Mathematica 7, and I have am using it to analyze experimental data. I need to export the Plots and Manipulate objects I construct to a SWF or FLV format. I’ve tried using the Export command, but unfortunately the output file is not dynamic! Mathematica renders each animation frame by frame (even if a slider is present in the Manipulate object). What I’d like is to create a 3D plot and Manipulate objects, export them to SWF and put them on a website so people can interact with it: rotate the 3d plots, and change the sliders in the manipulate objects. Is there any way (or workaround) for this? This would totally revolutionize the dissemination of analysis results!

Thanks,
Taylor

Mike,

You seem to have enjoyed du Sautoy’s “The Music of the Primes”, so you may well be interested in my new one (volume 1 of a trilogy):

http://www.secretsofcreation.com/volume1.html

This book has a significantly different emphasis from that of du Sautoy (and the three other books about the Riemann Hypothesis that came out around the same time. It’s concerned solely with *what is known* rather than *how we came to know it* (which has been adequately explored elsewhere). The Riemann Hypothesis will not appear until Volume 2.

Volume 1 ends having demonstrated to the reader, in wholly visual terms, how the system of positive integers can be (in a sense) harmonically decomposed, as discovered by Riemann in the 1850s. It has always struck me as odd that this truly remarkable fact is not generally taught as part of undergraduate mathematics curricula, and many (quite possibly a great majority of) professional mathematicians outside number theory seem unaware, or only vaguely aware, of it. But I believe that I’ve succeeded in explaining it in a way that anyone with a basic level of intelligence and focus can understand.

Robert Fuller (former Columbia University physicist, author of the seminal text book “Mathematics for Classical and Quantum Physics”) has described it as a “pedagogical tour de force” (and “clearer than du Sautoy”). Brian Josephson (Cambridge Nobel physics laureate) has responded to the book with similar enthusiasm, both scientists having expressed an eagerness to read the next two volumes.

keep blogging!
Matthew

Hey Mike

First of all, I love your blog ;)

I have been facing a problem with MATLAB and MAPLE and because it’s a small problem I couldn’t find a solution anywhere. I thought Mike Croucher the owner of one the most wonderful blogs will definitely help.

As you know, Maple 14 comes with the Maple Toolbox for Matlab, I have Maple 14 and Matlab 2010b. When installing Maple 14, I got to choose the default symbolic engine for Matlab and I choose Maple. It’s stated in the installation that I could always change the default symbolic engine by following the instructions in ‘help matlab_symbolic’.

I think I followed the instructions, here are bits of it:

[QUOTE] MATLAB_SYMBOLIC – Setting the default symbolic toolbox
The default symbolic toolbox is the version of the symbolic toolbox
used by MATLAB when it is launched using the standard start scripts or
shortcuts. The default symbolic toolbox is determined by the
environment variable
MATLAB_SYMBOLIC
which must be set to either ‘maple’ or ‘matlab’. To change
the default, set the variable to the appropriate value:
maple to use the Maple Toolbox;
or
matlab to use The MathWorks (Extended) Symbolic Math Toolbox.[/QUOTE]

I’m not an old user of Matlab nor am I a new user, but the simplicity of the above instructions and the fact I couldn’t change the engine made feel like a total ‘noob’

What I understood is that matlab_symbolic is a variable and needs to be changed as I want, just the same as saying x = ‘matlab’ or x = ‘maple’. This didn’t work, I tried matlab_symbolic = ‘matlab’ and nothing changed (tried it in capital letters as well, I figured that the engine did not change because of the way Maple engine outputs data). In addition, the ‘symengine’ function does not work any more in recent versions.

Can you please help me in changing symbolic engines? What am I missing?

Keep posting great topics in your blog :top:

Regards

Abdulhaq

Hi Mike,

Just thought you would want to let everyone know about the Mr. Wizard DVD’s for a great holiday gift. I lovee them and wanted to share that with you, maybe you can write something up about it. http://www.mrwizardstudios.com is doing a great holiday promotion to for all those Mr. Wizard fans out there, like myself.

Thanks!!

Archimedes Method – from an article in NA Digest

http://scmsa.eu/archives/archimede.htm

Have you any idea what the wonderful book is where Heisenberg writes of walking in the mountains and thinking? I read it at 17 and would love to find it again. Thanks.

Hi Mike,
I have been working on Maxima on Android porting. Recently I uploaded my first APK to the Google play.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.yhonda&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImpwLnlob25kYSJd

I would be happy if you pick it up in your next monthly math software introduction article.

Thanks and best regards,
Yasuaki Honda

hi,
Thought you might want to include a short note in your Month of Math Software to let python programmers know there is a package Svgwrite http://packages.python.org/svgwrite/index.html a good way to create Scalable Vector Graphics which are viewable with any modern uptodate browser. The free, independent SVG standard is not specifically aimed at mathematics but at the base are vectors so translation, rotation, scaling and zooming is all included. I’ve create example python programs and svg are at
https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0BwFQiTKfux0qY1Y2d1hRdndtSEk/edit
which show Bezier curves, tiling, guilloches and Perlin noise. Internet Explorer 9 will not show the feTurbulence filter so Windows 7 users will need to use another browser or wait until Microsloth decides to service existing users. IE10 was announced April 2011 but has not yet been released for Windows 7. It is used in Windows 8.
- Lawrence

Hi Mike

I’ve been following your blog for more than a year now and find it very insightful. Since I don’t work with math software on a daily basis I really enjoy your “Month of Math Software” updates every month as they keep me up to date of what is going on out there.

My day job involves firmware and hardware development and I’ve identified a problem with the EDA industry: The tools used produces and use a wide range of files which are not properly classified anywhere. There are numerous reasons for this, but I won’t go into that now. To solve the problem I’ve created a repository on GitHub which attempts to use the power of the crowd to properly classify these files. There are many advantages of have these files properly classified (referencing them, version control, documenting code etc.)

After I created the repository I noticed an overlap in the EDA and math software fields since some of the firmware development work I do is done in Simulink, and then generated into VHDL by Xilinx System generator.

I decided to add a math software section to this repository where the same thing can be done for the many math tools out there. The math software list is almost empty at the moment but its a starting point for people out there who uses math software on a daily basis.

The repository is hosted here: https://github.com/JPNaude/X-MimeTypes

I thought that you might find this interesting,
Cheers
Jaco

Have you discovered ‘J’ programming on the iPad? Its a revised implementation of APL without the funny characters. I found it in the Apple app store while looking for programming languages. Looks good for matrix operations.

Hi –
I’m curious – some time ago on you mentioned that matlab’s tic and toc often has variance even for the same operations. This never irked me, as it seems somewhat obvious, given operating system overhead and random factors, but it just occurred to me that the variation is really quite large…typically by, say 100 ms or so. Even a standard deviation of 10 ms seems kind of large. I’m keen to know what other factors come into play, if you have some thoughts.

Cheers,
Rich