Walking Randomly

Here in the UK we have a TV show called University Challenge where teams of students from British Universities compete in a general knowledge quiz.  I don’t watch it often but when I do I usually feel very pleased with myself if I manage to answer more than a couple of questions or so – my general knowledge isn’t anywhere near as good as I would like it to be.

The most recent series of the show was won by a team from Oxford’s Corpus Christi College but the star of the show was undoubtedly 26 year old Gail Trimble who has been heralded as possibly the greatest contestant in the show’s history. Jeremy Paxman, the show’s host, referredto her performance as an “intellectual blitzkrieg”.  I haven’t seen any of the shows she was in but I have read accounts and I am deeply impressed by the breadth and depth of this woman’s knowledge.

The reason I am bringing this up is up is because of the amount of people who have vilified her both online and in print.   As far as I can tell, the principal complaint is that she knows too much and that annoys people.  That’s right….she has been ridiculed for being clever!  How depressing.

Well Gail, on the faint off chance that you are reading this  I would like to congratulate you and your team for so soundly ‘opening a can of whup-ass’ on Manchester (The University that employs me for those who don’t know).  I salute you and in the spirit of the fabled Chuck Norris (and Jon Skeet of Stack Overflow fame) I offer the following Gail Trimble ‘facts’.

• Gail Trimble can divide by zero
• If your IQ is 170 and Gail Trimble’s IQ is 170 then she is more intelligent than you.
• Gail Trimble once answered a question 42 seconds before it was asked.
• Gail Trimble is the traveling salesman.   Only she knows the shortest route.
• Gail Trimble doesn’t answer questions…she stares them down till they answer themselves.
• The only time Gail Trimble was wrong was when she thought she had made a mistake.
• Gail Trimble has counted to infinity…..twice.
• If Gail Tribmle programmed computers then she would use butterflies.
• Gail Trimble can determine the next random number in a sequence.
• When you search for “guru” on Google it says “Did you mean Gail Trimble?”
• Gail Trimble can believe it’s not butter.

If you are completely baffled by this little reference to geek culture then maybe this wikipedia page will help you.

I have been using Feedburner to manage my RSS feeds for quite a while and they were taken over by google a while back. Until recently this had no effect at all but I was recently told that I had to migrate my feedburner account over to the google platform.

The process was completely automatic but according to my subscriber statistics I may have lost some of you. Looking around the web I see that a lot of people are having similar problems.

The feed seems to be working OK but if any of you are having problems then please try to re-subscribe. Sorry for any problems this may have caused.

Update (28th Jan 2009): My subscriber numbers are now back where I expected them to be and all is well with the new google version of feedburner.

Welcome to this – the last Carnival of Mathematics in 2008.  Sadly, submissions were on the low side this time around – probably due to the fact that many people were away from the internet over the festive season (and so they should be).  Rather than let this adversely affect the size of this carnival, I broke every rule in the carnival book and went searching for some submissions of my own.  I hope you enjoy the results…

Carnival tradition dictates that before I start the show I should entertain you all with some mathematical facts about the number 46 (since this is the 46th edition of the carnival – for those of you who have imbibed too much festive cheer) and I have managed to come up with:

• 46 is an evil number – but only for a certain definition of evil :)
• 46 is a Nonagonal (or enneagonal) number
• The prime factors of 46 are 2 and 23 which makes 46 an example of a semiprime number and a square-free number.
• 46 is a centred triangular number.

With tradition satisfied lets look at this edition’s submissions.

Rod Carvalho of Reasonable Deviations shows how to construct polynomials from their roots using a graphical approach.  This is a nice way of viewing the process of constructing polynomials, as all the cumbersome algebraic manipulation boils down to assigning values to the nodes of a graph.

Maria Andersen of TCMTB shows how to create an answer key to your calculus test (or any other test for that matter) using Windows Journal.  I have to confess that I have not used Windows Journal because it is part of Windows Vista – something I only ever use under duress.  Maria makes it look rather compelling though so maybe I need to convince a friend of mine to lend me their laptop!

John D. Cook of The Endeavour gives us a Constructive proof of the Chinese Remainder Theorem.  This comes at a good time for me because as part of my ‘fill in the huge gaps in my maths knowledge’ project, I have been learning about congruences from an Open University booklet I found in the library.  John also submitted his most popular post of 2008 – Jenga Mathematics which is more than worthy of your attention.

If I stuck to tradition then that would be it for this edition of the carnival since they were the only submissions I received.  It seems that the festive period really isn’t a good time for getting responses from math bloggers!   So, I threw tradition out of the window and went looking for some of my favourite maths blog posts from the last 12 months.  The only rules I tried to stick to were ‘one post per blog and one post per month’.

1 year, 12 months, 12 posts, 12 blogs – Happy new year to you all.

January:  Mathematics is logical, elegant and refined.  The real world isn’t! Just like a street fight, the real world is dirty, surprising and uncompromising and solving real-world mathematical problems in physics and engineering can often take phenomenal amounts of computational power. Enter street-fighting mathematics, an MIT course that teaches you some of the tricks and techniques you’ll need in order to get approximate answers to many real-world problems in just a few lines of mathematics.  I first learned of this course from a blog post by Michael Lugo of God Plays Dice back in January and yet I still haven’t found time to work through it.  With luck, I’ll manage it in 2009.

February: I like mathematics that’s pretty and so does Vlad Alexeev – author of both Mathpaint and Impossible World.  Back in February he highlighted a sculpture of a three dimensional Hilbert curve by Carlo H. Séquin.  This post also includes an image rendered by a piece of software called Maxwell Renderer which looks intruging – can anyone suggest the closest open source equivalent?

March: Thanks to Easter, a lot of people went egg-crazy back in March and Kathryn Cramer of Wolfram Research was one of them.  In response to her initial post a lot of us attempted to create Mathematical easter eggs using Mathematica.

April: I have never taken a course in graph theory and so I don’t know much about it but I have attended talks on the subject and so have seen an old map of Königsberg several times.  Using googlemaps, the guys over at 360 showed that if we pose the Königsberg problem today then the result is completely different.

May:  If you read this blog for more than a couple of weeks then you will quickly realise that I like computer algebra systems and yet the free, open source pacakge Axiom is one that I haven’t played with much.  Alasdair of Alasdair’s Musings has though and he has also written a great 6-part introduction to the system which started in May.

June: No Carnival is complete without a puzzle to solve and Tanya Khovanova gave us a great one back in June.

July: Back in July, Eric Roland gave us details of his prime generating formula. 

August: Google isn’t just a search engine – it’s a calculator too but, like all calculators, it doesn’t always give the correct results.  Stephen Shankland gave us the details back in August.

September: Brian Hayes of bit-player invited us all to just shut up and program.  All too often I read articles from old-timers (such as myself – recently hitting 31) who lament about the loss of a supposedly golden age of computing.  You see, back in the 80s and early 90s we used computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Acorn Archimedes and Amiga and all of them came with a programming language built in – usually some form of BASIC.  These old-timers argue that young-uns find it difficult to get into programming these days since computers no longer come with programming languages built in – or if they do then they are hidden from view in some way.

Of course this is a load of rubbish.  Hand me a computer with an internet connection and 60 seconds later I will hand it back to you with one or more programming environments installed that would be suitable for mathematical exploration (or mucking around as I prefer to think of it).  Brian’s article gives some ideas, both free and commercial, that might get you started.

October: Loren Shure of the Art of MATLAB explains how to create the Olympic rings using MATLAB.

November: What are p-adic numbers?  I have no idea – yet another subject that is on my list of subjects to study.  Dave Richeson of ‘Divison by Zero’ knows what they are though and gave a basic introduction to them back in November.  Thanks Dave – that post now represents the sum total of my knowledge on the subject.

December: Finally we reach December and a post from squareCircleZ who explains how Archimedes was doing calculus 2000 years before Newton and Leibniz.

So, that’s it.  The final carnival of mathematics for 2008.  I hope that no one minds the breaks from tradition and I hope you will join me in supporting the carnival throughout 2009.  Happy new year to you all

The 41st Carnival of Maths is now available over at 360 and includes two articles from Walking Randomly. Don’t let that put you off though as there is loads of other great stuff for your reading pleasure.

I have been using the current theme on Walking Randomly ever since I started and, for the most part, I really like it but just recently I have started to get fed up with it for various reasons and so I am thinking of a change. Essentially I need a drop-in replacement since my HTML / CSS coding skills are basic and non-existent respectively. Does anyone have any advice?

While reading 360’s recent post about crop circles, I was reminded of something similar that caught my attention a while back – this:

What you are looking at is the phrase “Hello, world!” encoded in Semacode and mown into a wheat field. Measuring 160m x 160m, it is possibly the largest “Hello, World!” program every written. It was made back in 2007 by German programmer bernhard hopfengärtner who aimed (and succeeded) to get it included in aerial photography taken by Google Earth.

The Challenge

Now I have no idea if this is possible but that does not stop me asking the question. Can anyone come up with a program that takes the above image as input, parse the semacode and see if it really does print “Hello World.”

I guess something like MATLAB would have some of the required functionality in its image toolbox but I haven’t yet googled to see if there is a suitable open source Semacode algorithm that you could feed the image into.

Have fun!

I’m in a good mood today – lots of things have gone right for me over the last few hours and the sun is shining (a rare event in Manchester – especially in October). Since I’m in such a good mood I thought that I would take a request or two.

As the title says – what tutorials would you like to see made available here? Technologies I could cover include Mathematica, MATLAB, NAG, Python, SAGE and several others. Subjects could include particular areas of Mathematics, programming or just something along the lines of ‘How do I make application XYZ do ABC’? If I don’t have enough smarts to do it myself then I will try to press gang someone into doing it for us.

I can’t make any promises of course but if you don’t ask you don’t get. So…while the sun is shining…ask away :)

This morning I received the following in my email and it made me smile. It’s almost certainly apocryphal but that doesn’t make it any less amusing.

At an American university, there were four sophomores taking chemistry and all of them had an ‘A’ so far.
These four friends were so confident that, the weekend before finals, they decided to visit some friends and have a big party. They had a great time but, after all the hearty partying, they slept all day Sunday and didn’t make it back to the university until early Monday morning.

Rather than taking the final then, they decided that after the final, they would explain to their professor why they missed it. They said that they visited friends but on the way back they had a flat tyre. As a result, they missed the final. The professor agreed they could make up the final the next day. The guys were excited and relieved.

They studied that night for the exam.

The next day the professor placed them in separate rooms and gave them a test booklet. They quickly answered the first problem worth 5 points. Cool, they thought! Each one in separate rooms, thinking this was going to be easy. …
Then they turned the page. On the second page was written….
For 95 points: Which tyre?

I’ve got that Friday feeling! Here are some links for you reading pleasure.

Who’s afraid of the LHC? Where it is explained that while the appearance of a planet destroying black hole is possible on September 10th , it isn’t very probable.

The Pandora – Open the box and get the latest information on the object of my latest bout of gadget lust.

Sudoku Variations – Bored of standard Sudoku? Try out the large number of variations described here.

Exactly one year ago today I wrote the first post on what has become my own little piece of the web. Walking Randomly was created on a whim after a conversation between myself and a web developer called Matt who was leaving the University to set up his own business. Beer was involved (for me anyway – he is tee-total) and so the details of the conversation are fuzzy to say the least but the net result was that I ended up with a version of Word Press installed on a server in the States along with the domain name of my choosing and an email that said “Have fun blogging.”

When someone goes to that amount of trouble on your behalf it would be churlish not to actually do something with it so I started writing about whatever entered my rather chaotic thoughts to see if I could make anything of it.

So, one year and 120 posts later, has it been succesful? Well, that very much depends on your point of view. My brother is an economist and he may well ask “Has it made you any money?” The answer to that question is “Not a penny!” – in fact it costs me money (although not much – I think Matt is giving me mates rates on hosting). So from this point of view it is a complete failure. In my defense, however, apart from a few Amazon Associate links, I haven’t attempted to make any money from it so my lack of monetary success is hardly surprising.

How else can one measure the success of a blog? Number of hits per day perhaps? Well, depending on which analytical tool I choose to believe, Walking Randomly gets somewhere between 250 (according to awstats) and 670 (according to webalizer) visits per day and this is rising steadily. Then there is the number of RSS subscribers which currently stands at 143 according to Feedburner. The number of RSS subscribers fluctuates on a daily basis but the general trend is upwards so I am at least going in the right direction. These figures might not be stellar but they aren’t bad considering that WR is somewhat of a niche site (putting it mildly).

What other figures can I use to measure Walking Randomly? Well, it has a google Page Rank of 4 out of 10 and an Alexa rating of 1,57222,14562 – both of which are somewhat disappointing. It also has a Technorati Authority rating of 38 which puts it in the top 276,569 blogs apparently. Whichever way you choose to look at these 3 statistics, WR is not doing so well but should I care? Do these numbers actually matter? What’s your opinion?

A less numerical but, in my opinion at least, much more important measure of blogging success comes from people’s reaction to what you write. For example, if I write an article explaining how to fix a problem with MATLAB and if even only one person finds it useful enough to say so in the comments section then it pretty much makes my day. Blog comments are a powerful thing – any one of you readers could make or break my day with a well crafted one – so be gentle!

It’s even better when someone goes to the trouble of linking to your site, providing they are doing so in a positive light of course. One person linked to me recently with along with the comment “Even the title suites me. I’ve been surfing this site most of the day. It’s amazingly cool.” and I didn’t even need to pay her! I don’t think that anything I have ever done has ever been described as ‘Amazingly cool’ before – I’d call that a success. Whoever you are – Thank you!

When all is said and done I enjoy going through the process of putting a post together and I enjoy getting feedback from readers and so, if viewed as a pleasant way of passing the time, WR has been a resounding success. My only hope is that it is as much fun to read as it is to write.

Now, where’s the Champage? I have a birthday to celebrate!