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A Tally Hall fractal
And as a special treat for those of you following along on the blog, here's the link to the Desmos graph if you want to play around with it: https://www.desmos.com/geometry/lwedpghpti ...and the background music (my instrumental cover of Tally Hall's "A Lady") is here if you want it.
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Sherlock Holmes 2: "I am extremely lazy"
This is part 2 of an ongoing series. Part 1, covering the first half of Chapter 1 of A Study in Scarlet, can be found here. Where were we? Oh yeah, about to meet Sherlock Holmes. I suppose we might as well jump in. It [the hospital] was familiar ground to me, and I needed…
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Real-valued chess is... strange
This was a fun video to make. Is it a fun video to watch? Only you can answer that question
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Statistical Pi(e)
Statistics is probably the branch of math most closely related to science. Stats is what sets the scientific ball rolling: if you have a hypothesis, you get data, then use stats to analyze the data and come to conclusions about your hypothesis. It's hard to imagine a way to make stats useless. Of course, this…
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An Eccentric Approach to Conic Sections
Following are the conic sections. (They are created by slicing up two cones, hence the name.) I have taken the liberty of annotating them: Okay, so obviously they're a lot more interesting than you may be led to believe. Hey, want to know something neat? Ellipses are very similar to hyperbolas. No, they really are.…
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On Factorials and the Gamma Function
Factorials. The most emphatic operation. It's notated It's defined as: with 0! defined to be equal to 1. We'll get to why in a moment. Now, one interesting consequence of the way the factorial is defined is that . (Why? Think about it.) What's the point of factorials? Say you have five ambiguously-shaped objects, and…
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That's Life 3: The Three Types of Things
This is part 3 of a series of posts about Conway's Game of Life; the other two can be found here and here, and here's a supplemental post about how to play Life on a computer. I'll start with a confession: the title of this post is sort of a lie—there are more types of…
