A Mathematical 'Table of Ease' from 1557

Note: "squares of zenzicubes"!

From Recorde's 'The Whetstone of Witte' (1557). "The fruitful table, which may be called the table of ease".

There are some awesome words in this table. Check out number 16. And 'squares of cubicubes'. pic.twitter.com/mhGOTD0LFB

— Jo Morgan (@mathsjem) March 21, 2019

Is 1 the Loneliest Number?

I like (several renditions of) the song "One (is The Loneliest Number)", but I get irked every time I hear following line "One is a number divided by two", because that is just a trivial existence statement.

(Some — most? — versions of the song actually have the line "One is the number divided by two", which is even worse, because of the "the".)

I suppose that this doesn't bother anybody else?

A Very Long Login ID

For reasons that I can't fathom, the staff member for the journal decided to give us a login ID with 71 characters.

Apparently, one can never have too many characters in a login ID, especially a prime one.

The Largest Prime Number in a Song

The largest prime number in a popular song is 8675309.https://t.co/A4aXni8NZU

— Algebra Fact (@AlgebraFact) November 29, 2017

(Tip of the cap to MathFeed.)

Perceptions of the Probability of Ambiguous Statements

You can completely mess up this chart in the UK simply by using the word "quite". That will do quite an ambiguous number on the perceived probabilities.

(More seriously, I really like this visualization.)

Fantastic enumeration/visualization of qualitative statements re probability via @amandacox https://t.co/XtFnHD2Zgp | @rsimmon @johnjhorton pic.twitter.com/DeByHToazi

— Nicholas Christakis (@NAChristakis) April 25, 2017

Happy Pi Day!

Today is, of course, Pi Day. And I love how the Colorado Rockies celebrated it today!

(Tip of the cap to Jeremy Stell.)

Update (3/19/17): I forgot to mention that I found out a few days ago that there was some Photoshopping in the above picture. It's still very cool, though not quite as cool as before.

Visualizations of π

Several of these visualizations of π are absolutely stunning.

Happy epic Pi Day! It is epic because the year is 2015 (so 3/14/15 in US reckoning), so there are two particular times to celebrate: in the morning and evening at 9:26:535....

(Tip of the cap to Andy Sudol for the website with the visualizations.)

"Cookies" Comes After "Ten"

The spam-protection question below is ambiguous. (It turned out that they were assuming that I should enter an integer.)

Bill and Ted and Their Quantum Computer

When I saw the picture associated with this post, the first thing that came to my mind was the quantum computer saying "69, Dude!" when asked about its favorite number.

Letters (and Numbers) and Butterfly Wings

Well, it turns out that one can find every letter in the English alphabet, as well as the numbers 0--9, imprinted in butterfly wings. Awesome!

P.S. I hope somebody appreciates the allusion in the title of this entry.

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

Giving the Finger in Binary

This is how to use a binary representation to give people the finger.

10/10/10 = 42 Day

I was well aware that today is 10/10/10---especially given the birthday party that reminded me of it!---but I hadn't caught that 101010 is the binary representation of 42.

(Tip of the cap to Puck Rombach.)

Rectangling the Circle

In Steve Strogatz's latest article in The New York Times, he discusses limits and presents a nice proof that the area of a circle is π*r^2, where r is the radius of the circle. (The proof that I saw in calculus was with an integral, but this one in Strogatz's article is much more clever and insightful.)

This one goes out to all my Scurvy friends.

This is blog entry #666.

In celebration, I am going to light a pentagram on fire and summon a demon. Then I'm going to howl at the moon and participate in a druidic ceremony. Booyah!