## Getting Into Shapes

This is, in part, a post for myself. They all are, but this is moreso. My day job includes some Geographic Information Services stuff, which is how we say “maps” when we want to be taken seriously as Information Technology professionals. When we make maps, what we really do is have a computer draw polygons, and then put dots on them. A common need is to put a dot in the middle of a polygon. Yes, this sounds silly, but describe your job this abstractly and see how it comes out.

The trouble is polygons can be complicated stuff. Can be, not are. If the polygon is, like, the border of your building’s property it’s probably not too crazy. It’s probably a rectangle, or at least a trapezoid. Maybe there’s a curved boundary. If you need a dot, such as to place the street address or a description of the property, you can make a good guess about where to put it so it’s inside the property and not too close to an edge.

But you can’t always. The polygons can be complicated. Especially if you’re representing stuff that reflects government or scientific or commercial interest. There’s good reasons to be interested in the boundaries between the low-low tide and the high-high tide lines of a beach, but that’s not going to look like anything simple for any realistic property. Finding a representative spot to fix labels or other business gets tricky.

So this crossed my Twitter feed and I’ll probably want to refer back to it at some point. It’s an algorithm, published last August by Vladimir Agafonkin at Mapbox, which uses some computation tricks to find a reasonable center.

The approach is, broadly, of a kind with many numerical methods. It tries to find an answer by taking a guess and then seeing if any obvious variations will make it a little better. If you can, then, repeat these variations. Eventually, usually, you’ll get to a pretty good answer. It may not be the exact best possible answer, but that’s all right. We accept that we’ll have a merely approximate answer, but we’ll get it more quickly than we otherwise would have. Often this is fine. Nobody will be upset that the label on a map would be “better” moved one pixel to the right if they get the map ten seconds faster. Optimization is often like that.

I have not tried putting this code into mine yet; I’ve just now read it and I have some higher-priority tasks at work. But I’m hoping to remember that this exists and to see whether I can use it.

## Dabbing and the Pythagorean Theorem

The picture explains itself nicely. Just a thought on an average day.

I enjoyed this article from Fox Sports. Apparently, a French Precalculus textbook created a homework problem asking if football (soccer) superstar Paul Pogba is doing the perfect dab by creating two right triangles.

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## Reading the Comics, May 20, 2017: Major Computer Malfunction Week Edition

I was hit by a massive computer malfunction this week, the kind that forced me to buy a new computer and spend half a week copying stuff over from a limping hard drive and hoping it would maybe work if I held things just right. Mercifully, Comic Strip Master Command gave me a relatively easy week. No huge rush of mathematically-themed comic strips and none that are going to take a thousand words of writing to describe. Let’s go.

Sam Hepburn’s Questionable Quotebook for the 14th includes this week’s anthropomorphic geometry sketch underneath its big text block.

Eric the Circle for the 15th, this one by “Claire the Square”, is the rare Eric the Circle to show off properties of circles. So maybe that’s the second anthropomorphic geometry sketch for the week. If the week hadn’t been dominated by my computer woes that might have formed the title for this edition.

Werner Wejp-Olsen’s Inspector Danger’s Crime Quiz for the 15th puts a mathematician in mortal peril and leaves him there to die. As is traditional for this sort of puzzle the mathematician left a dying clue. (Mathematicians were similarly kind to their investigators on the 4th of July, 2016 and the 9th of July, 2012. I was expecting the answer to be someone with a four-letter and an eight-letter name, none of which anybody here had. Doesn’t matter. It’ll never stand up in court.

John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not for the 17th features one of those astounding claims that grows out of number theory. Graziano asserts that there are an astounding 50,613,244,155,051,856 ways to score exactly 100 points in (ten-pin) bowling. I won’t deny that this seems high to me. But partitioning a number — that is, taking a (positive) whole number and writing down the different ways one can add up (positive) whole numbers to get that sum — often turns up a lot of possibilities. That there should be many ways to get a score of 100 by adding between ten and twenty numbers that could be between zero and ten each, plus the possibility of adding pairs of the numbers (for spares) or trios of numbers (for strikes) makes this less astonishing.

Wikipedia led me to this page, from Balmoral Software, about all the different ways there are to score different numbers. The most surprising thing it reveals to me is that 100 isn’t even the score with the greatest number of possible scores. 77 is. There are 172,542,309,343,731,946 ways to score exactly 77 points. I agree this ought to make me feel better about my game. It doesn’t. It turns out there are, altogether, something like 5,726,805,883,325,784,576 possible different outcomes for a bowling game. And how we can tell that, given there’s no practical way to go and list all of them, is described at the end of the page.

The technique is called “divide and conquer”. There’s no way to list all the outcomes of ten frames of bowling, but there’s certainly a way to list all the outcomes of one. Or two. Or three. So, work out how many possible scores there would be in few enough frames you can handle that. Then combine these shortened games into one that’s the full ten frames. There’s some trouble in matching up the ends of the short games. A spare or a strike in the last frame of a shortened game means one has to account for the first or first two frames of the next one. But this is still an easier problem than the one we started with.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 18th (rerun from the 25th of May, 2006) is your standard percentages and infinities joke. Really would have expected Paige’s mother to be wise to this game by now, but this sort of thing happens.

## Everything Interesting There Is To Say About Springs

I need another supplemental essay to get to the next part in Why Stuff Can Orbit. (Here’s the last part.) You probably guessed it’s about springs. They’re useful to know about. Why? That one killer Mystery Science Theater 3000 short, yes. But also because they turn up everywhere.

Not because there are literally springs in everything. Not with the rise in anti-spring political forces. But what makes a spring is a force that pushes something back where it came from. It pushes with a force that grows just as fast as the distance from where it came grows. Most anything that’s stable, that has some normal state which it tends to look like, acts like this. A small nudging away from the normal state gets met with some resistance. A bigger nudge meets bigger resistance. And most stuff that we see is stable. If it weren’t stable it would have broken before we got there.

(There are exceptions. Stable is, sometimes, about perspective. It can be that something is unstable but it takes so long to break that we don’t have to worry about it. Uranium, for example, is dying, turning slowly into stable elements like lead and helium. There will come a day there’s none left in the Earth. But it takes so long to break down that, barring surprises, the Earth will have broken down into something else first. And it may be that something is unstable, but it’s created by something that’s always going on. Oxygen in the atmosphere is always busy combining with other chemicals. But oxygen stays in the atmosphere because life keeps breaking it out of other chemicals.)

Now I need to put in some terms. Start with your thing. It’s on a spring, literally or metaphorically. Don’t care. If it isn’t being pushed in any direction then it’s at rest. Or it’s at an equilibrium. I don’t want to call this the ideal or natural state. That suggests some moral superiority to one way of existing over another, and how do I know what’s right for your thing? I can tell you what it acts like. It’s your business whether it should. Anyway, your thing has an equilibrium.

Next term is the displacement. It’s how far your thing is from the equilibrium. If it’s really a block of wood on a spring, like it is in high school physics, this displacement is how far the spring is stretched out. In equations I’ll represent this as ‘x’ because I’m not going to go looking deep for letters for something like this. What value ‘x’ has will change with time. This is what makes it a physics problem. If we want to make clear that ‘x’ does depend on time we might write ‘x(t)’. We might go all the way and start at the top of the page with ‘x = x(t)’, just in case.

If ‘x’ is a positive number it means your thing is displaced in one direction. If ‘x’ is a negative number it was displaced in the opposite direction. By ‘one direction’ I mean ‘to the right, or else up’. By ‘the opposite direction’ I mean ‘to the left, or else down’. Yes, you can pick any direction you like but why are you making life harder for everyone? Unless there’s something compelling about the setup of your thing that makes another choice make sense just go along with what everyone else is doing. Apply your creativity and iconoclasm where it’ll make your life better instead.

Also, we only have to worry about one direction. This might surprise you. If you’ve played much with springs you might have noticed how they’re three-dimensional objects. You can set stuff swinging back and forth in two directions at once. That’s all right. We can describe a two-dimensional displacement as a displacement in one direction plus a displacement perpendicular to that. And if there’s no such thing as friction, they won’t interact. We can pretend they’re two problems that happen to be running on the same spring at the same time. So here I declare: we can ignore friction and pretend it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to deal with more than one direction at a time.

(It’s not only friction. There’s problems about how energy gets transmitted between ways the thing can oscillate. This is what causes what starts out as a big whack in one direction to turn into a middling little circular wobbling. That’s a higher level physics than I want to do right now. So here I declare: we can ignore that and pretend it doesn’t matter.)

Whether your thing is displaced or not it’s got some potential energy. This can be as large or as small as you like, down to some minimum when your thing is at equilibrium. The potential energy we represent as a number named ‘U’ because of good reasons that somebody surely had. The potential energy of a spring depends on the square of the displacement. We can write its value as ‘U = ½ k x2‘. Here ‘k’ is a number known as the spring constant. It describes how strongly the spring reacts; the bigger ‘k’ is, the more any displacement’s met with a contrary force. It’ll be a positive number. ½ is that same old one-half that you know from ideas being half-baked or going-off being half-cocked.

Potential energy is great. If you can describe a physics problem with its energy you’re in good shape. It lets us bring physical intuition into understanding things. Imagine a bowl or a Habitrail-type ramp that’s got the cross-section of your potential energy. Drop a little marble into it. How the marble rolls? That’s what your thingy does in that potential energy.

Also we have mathematics. Calculus, particularly differential equations, lets us work out how the position of your thing will change. We need one more piece for this. That’s the momentum of your thing. Momentum is traditionally represented with the letter ‘p’. And now here’s how stuff moves when you know the potential energy ‘U’:

$\frac{dp}{dt} = - \frac{\partial U}{\partial x}$

Let me unpack that. $\frac{dp}{dt}$ — also known as $\frac{d}{dt}p$ if that looks better — is “the derivative of p with respect to t”. It means “how the value of the momentum changes as the time changes”. And that is equal to minus one times …

You might guess that $\frac{\partial U}{\partial x}$ — also written as $\frac{\partial}{\partial x} U$ — is some kind of derivative. The $\partial$ looks kind of like a cursive d, after all. It’s known as the partial derivative, because it means we look at how ‘U’ changes as ‘x’ and nothing else at all changes. With the normal, ‘d’ style full derivative, we have to track how all the variables change as the ‘t’ we’re interested in changes. In this particular problem the difference doesn’t matter. But there are problems where it does matter and that’s why I’m careful about the symbols.

So now we fall back on how to take derivatives. This gives us the equation that describes how the physics of your thing on a spring works:

$\frac{dp}{dt} = - k x$

You’re maybe underwhelmed. This is because we haven’t got any idea how the momentum ‘p’ relates to the displacement ‘x’. Well, we do, because I know and if you’re still reading at this point you know full well what momentum is. But let me make it official. Momentum is, for this kind of thing, the mass ‘m’ of your thing times how its position is changing, which is $\frac{dx}{dt}$. The mass of your thing isn’t changing. If you’re going to let it change then we’re doing some screwy rocket problem and that’s a different article. So its easy to get the momentum out of that problem. We get instead the second derivative of the displacement with respect to time:

$m\frac{d^2 x}{dt^2} = - kx$

Fine, then. Does that tell us anything about what ‘x(t)’ is? Not yet, but I will now share with you one of the top secrets that only real mathematicians know. We will take a guess to what the answer probably is. Then we’ll see in what circumstances that answer could possibly be right. Does this seem ad hoc? Fine, so it’s ad hoc. Here is the secret of mathematicians:

It’s fine if you get your answer by any stupid method you like, including guessing and getting lucky, as long as you check that your answer is right.

Oh, sure, we’d rather you get an answer systematically, since a system might give us ideas how to find answers in new problems. But if all we want is an answer then, by definition, we don’t care where it came from. Anyway, we’re making a particular guess, one that’s very good for this sort of problem. Indeed, this guess is our system. A lot of guesses at solving differential equations use exactly this guess. Are you ready for my guess about what solves this? Because here it is.

We should expect that

$x(t) = C e^{r t}$

Here ‘C’ is some constant number, not yet known. And ‘r’ is some constant number, not yet known. ‘t’ is time. ‘e’ is that number 2.71828(etc) that always turns up in these problems. Why? Because its derivative is very easy to take, and if we have to take derivatives we want them to be easy to take. The first derivative of $Ce^{rt}$ with respect to ‘t’ is $r Ce^{rt}$. The second derivative with respect to ‘t’ is $r^2 Ce^{rt}$. so here’s what we have:

$m r^2 Ce^{rt} = - k Ce^{rt}$

What we’d like to find are the values for ‘C’ and ‘r’ that make this equation true. It’s got to be true for every value of ‘t’, yes. But this is actually an easy equation to solve. Why? Because the $C e^{rt}$ on the left side has to equal the $C e^{rt}$ on the right side. As long as they’re not equal to zero and hey, what do you know? $C e^{rt}$ can’t be zero unless ‘C’ is zero. So as long as ‘C’ is any number at all in the world except zero we can divide this ugly lump of symbols out of both sides. (If ‘C’ is zero, then this equation is 0 = 0 which is true enough, I guess.) What’s left?

$m r^2 = -k$

OK, so, we have no idea what ‘C’ is and we’re not going to have any. That’s all right. We’ll get it later. What we can get is ‘r’. You’ve probably got there already. There’s two possible answers:

$r = \pm\sqrt{-\frac{k}{m}}$

You might not like that. You remember that ‘k’ has to be positive, and if mass ‘m’ isn’t positive something’s screwed up. So what are we doing with the square root of a negative number? Yes, we’re getting imaginary numbers. Two imaginary numbers, in fact:

$r = \imath \sqrt{\frac{k}{m}}, r = - \imath \sqrt{\frac{k}{m}}$

Which is right? Both. In some combination, too. It’ll be a bit with that first ‘r’ plus a bit with that second ‘r’. In the differential equations trade this is called superposition. We’ll have information that tells us how much uses the first ‘r’ and how much uses the second.

You might still be upset. Hey, we’ve got these imaginary numbers here describing how a spring moves and while you might not be one of those high-price physicists you see all over the media you know springs aren’t imaginary. I’ve got a couple responses to that. Some are semantic. We only call these numbers “imaginary” because when we first noticed they were useful things we didn’t know what to make of them. The label is an arbitrary thing that doesn’t make any demands of the numbers. If we had called them, oh, “Cardanic numbers” instead would you be upset that you didn’t see any Cardanos in your springs?

My high-class semantic response is to ask in exactly what way is the “square root of minus one” any less imaginary than “three”? Can you give me a handful of three? No? Didn’t think so.

And then the practical response is: don’t worry. Exponentials raised to imaginary numbers do something amazing. They turn into sine waves. Well, sine and cosine waves. I’ll spare you just why. You can find it by looking at the first twelve or so posts of any pop mathematics blog and its article about how amazing Euler’s Formula is. Given that Euler published, like, 2,038 books and papers through his life and the fifty years after his death it took to clear the backlog you might think, “Euler had a lot of Formulas, right? Identities too?” Yes, he did, but you’ll know this one when you see it.

What’s important is that the displacement of your thing on a spring will be described by a function which looks like this:

$x(t) = C_1 e^{\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t} + C_2 e^{-\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t}$

for two constants, ‘C1‘ and ‘C2‘. These were the things we called ‘C’ back when we thought the answer might be $Ce^{rt}$; there’s two of them because there’s two r’s. I give you my word this is equivalent to a formula like this, but you can make me show my work if you must:

$x(t) = A cos\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right) + B sin\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right)$

for some (other) constants ‘A’ and ‘B’. Cosine and sine are the old things you remember from learning about cosine and sine.

OK, but what are ‘A’ and ‘B’?

Generically? We don’t care. Some numbers. Maybe zero. Maybe not. The pattern, how the displacement changes over time, will be the same whatever they are. It’ll be regular oscillation. At one time your thing will be as far from the equilibrium as it gets, and not moving toward or away from the center. At one time it’ll be back at the center and moving as fast as it can. At another time it’ll be as far away from the equilibrium as it gets, but on the other side. At another time it’ll be back at the equilibrium and moving as fast as it ever does, but the other way. How far is that maximum? What’s the fastest it travels?

The answer’s in how we started. If we start at the equilibrium without any kind of movement we’re never going to leave the equilibrium. We have to get nudged out of it. But what kind of nudge? There’s three ways you can do to nudge something out.

You can tug it out some and let it go from rest. This is the easiest: then ‘A’ is however big your tug was and ‘B’ is zero.

You can let it start from equilibrium but give it a good whack so it’s moving at some initial velocity. This is the next-easiest: ‘A’ is zero, and ‘B’ is … no, not the initial velocity. You need to look at what the velocity of your thing is at the start. That’s the first derivative:

$\frac{dx}{dt} = -\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}}A sin\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right) + \sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} B sin\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right)$

The start is when time is zero because we don’t need to be difficult. when ‘t’ is zero the above velocity is $\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} B$. So that product has to be the initial velocity. That’s not much harder.

The third case is when you start with some displacement and some velocity. A combination of the two. Then, ugh. You have to figure out ‘A’ and ‘B’ that make both the position and the velocity work out. That’s the simultaneous solutions of equations, and not even hard equations. It’s more work is all. I’m interested in other stuff anyway.

Because, yeah, the spring is going to wobble back and forth. What I’d like to know is how long it takes to get back where it started. How long does a cycle take? Look back at that position function, for example. That’s all we need.

$x(t) = A cos\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right) + B sin\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right)$

Sine and cosine functions are periodic. They have a period of 2π. This means if you take the thing inside the parentheses after a sine or a cosine and increase it — or decrease it — by 2π, you’ll get the same value out. What’s the first time that the displacement and the velocity will be the same as their starting values? If they started at t = 0, then, they’re going to be back there at a time ‘T’ which makes true the equation

$\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} T = 2\pi$

And that’s going to be

$T = 2\pi\sqrt{\frac{m}{k}}$

Maybe surprising thing about this: the period doesn’t depend at all on how big the displacement is. That’s true for perfect springs, which don’t exist in the real world. You knew that. Imagine taking a Junior Slinky from the dollar store and sticking a block of something on one end. Imagine stretching it out to 500,000 times the distance between the Earth and Jupiter and letting go. Would it act like a spring or would it break? Yeah, we know. It’s sad. Think of the animated-cartoon joy a spring like that would produce.

But this period not depending on the displacement is true for small enough displacements, in the real world. Or for good enough springs. Or things that work enough like springs. By “true” I mean “close enough to true”. We can give that a precise mathematical definition, which turns out to be what you would mean by “close enough” in everyday English. The difference is it’ll have Greek letters included.

So to sum up: suppose we have something that acts like a spring. Then we know qualitatively how it behaves. It oscillates back and forth in a sine wave around the equilibrium. Suppose we know what the spring constant ‘k’ is. Suppose we also know ‘m’, which represents the inertia of the thing. If it’s a real thing on a real spring it’s mass. Then we know quantitatively how it moves. It has a period, based on this spring constant and this mass. And we can say how big the oscillations are based on how big the starting displacement and velocity are. That’s everything I care about in a spring. At least until I get into something wild like several springs wired together, which I am not doing now and might never do.

And, as we’ll see when we get back to orbits, a lot of things work close enough to springs.

• #### tkflor 8:13 pm on Saturday, 20 May, 2017 Permalink | Reply

“I don’t want to call this the ideal or natural state. That suggests some moral superiority to one way of existing over another, and how do I know what’s right for your thing? ”
Why don’t you call it a “ground state”?

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• #### Joseph Nebus 6:49 am on Friday, 26 May, 2017 Permalink | Reply

You’re right. This is a ground state.

For folks just joining in, the “ground state” is what the system looks like when it’s got the least possible energy. At least the least energy consistent with it being a system at all. For a spring problem that’s the one where the thing is at rest, at the center, not displaced at all.

In a more complicated system you can have an equilibrium that’s stable and that isn’t the ground state. That isn’t the case here, but I wonder if thinking about that didn’t make me avoid calling it a ground state.

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## Reading the Comics, May 13, 2017: Quiet Tuesday Through Saturday Edition

From the Sunday and Monday comics pages I was expecting another banner week. And then there was just nothing from Tuesday on, at least not among the comic strips I read. Maybe Comic Strip Master Command has ordered jokes saved up for the last weeks before summer vacation.

Tony Cochrane’s Agnes for the 7th is a mathematics anxiety strip. It’s well-expressed, since Cochrane writes this sort of hyperbole well. It also shows a common attitude that words and stories are these warm, friendly things, while mathematics and numbers are cold and austere. Perhaps Agnes is right to say some of the problem is familiarity. It’s surely impossible to go a day without words, if you interact with people or their legacies; to go without numbers … well, properly impossible. There’s too many things that have to be counted. Or places where arithmetic sneaks in, such as getting enough money to buy a thing. But those don’t seem to be the kinds of mathematics people get anxious about. Figuring out how much change, that’s different.

I suppose some of it is familiarity. It’s easier to dislike stuff you don’t do often. The unfamiliar is frightening, or at least annoying. And humans are story-oriented. Even nonfiction forms stories well. Mathematics … has stories, as do all human projects. But the mathematics itself? I don’t know. There’s just beautiful ingenuity and imagination in a lot of it. I’d just been thinking of the just beautiful scheme for calculating logarithms from a short table. But it takes time to get to that beauty.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 7th is a fractions joke. It might also be a joke about women concealing their ages. Or perhaps it’s about mathematicians expressing things in needlessly complicated ways. I think that’s less a mathematician’s trait than a common human trait. If you’re expert in a thing it’s hard to resist the puckish fun of showing that expertise off. Or just sowing confusion where one may.

Daniel Shelton’s Ben for the 8th is a kid-doing-arithmetic problem. Even I can’t squeeze some deeper subject meaning out of it, but it’s a slow week so I’ll include the strip anyway. Sorry.

Brian Boychuk and Ron Boychuk’s Chuckle Brothers for the 8th is the return of anthropomorphic-geometry joke after what feels like months without. I haven’t checked how long it’s been without but I’m assuming you’ll let me claim that. Thank you.

• #### Joshua K. 4:53 am on Thursday, 18 May, 2017 Permalink | Reply

Perhaps the father in the “Ben” strip, rather than snoring, was telling his son about the set of integers.

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## Excuses, But Classed Up Some

Afraid I’m behind on resuming Why Stuff Can Orbit, mostly as a result of a power outage yesterday. It wasn’t a major one, but it did reshuffle all the week’s chores to yesterday when we could be places that had power, and kept me from doing as much typing as I wanted. I’m going to be riding this excuse for weeks.

So instead, here, let me pass this on to you.

It links to a post about the Legendre Transform, which is one of those cool advanced tools you get a couple years into a mathematics or physics major. It is, like many of these cool advanced tools, about solving differential equations. Differential equations turn up anytime the current state of something affects how it’s going to change, which is to say, anytime you’re looking at something not boring. It’s one of mathematics’s uses of “duals”, letting you swap between the function you’re interested in and what you know about how the function you’re interested in changes.

On the linked page, Jonathan Manton tries to present reasons behind the Legendre transform, in ways he likes better. It might not explain the idea in a way you like, especially if you haven’t worked with it before. But I find reading multiple attempts to explain an idea helpful. Even if one perspective doesn’t help, having a cluster of ideas often does.

## How April 2017 Treated My Mathematics Blog

Didn’t think I’d forget to post my readership review, did you? I just ran out of good posting slots for it last week, as I didn’t want to put off my return to Why Stuff Can Orbit more.

So, my page views dropped back below a thousand for the month. I knew it would happen sooner or later. It just barely missed a thousand, too: WordPress says I had 994 pages viewed over the month. It’s not significantly different to March’s 1,026, although given that I posted one more thing over the month than I did the previous month it hurts. At its rate I’d have had 1,027.1 views were April a 31-day month. That sort of excuse won’t fly; in so-short February there were 1,063 page views here. I’m just in a thousand-view groove right now.

The number of distinct visitors was technically down, but I can’t say it’s by anything significant. There were 696 visitors in April, down from 699 in March, and up from 680 in February. That’s no difference at all.

The number of likes were up slightly, to 90 in April. There had been 85 in March and 77 in February. There’s no disapproving of that trend, although as happened on my humor blog I noticed the long-term trend and realized my likability peaked sometime around June of 2015. That was the month of my first-ever A To Z project, but I’m surprised to not have had anything near that peak (518 likes!) since.

Not pictured: the rising curve of how much my Mom likes my posts.

Comments were flat again, 16 for April. There were 15 in March and 18 in February. I’m going to screw up my month-to-month comparisons again. I’m switching my links to previous posts back to the way that gets counted as a comment. So I’ll lose track of how often people actually say something versus how often I point people to my own writing. And I need to ask more engaging questions anyway.

So what articles were popular here in April? Two perennials, a couple of did-you-read-this bits, and then the answer to a trivia question people sometimes think to ask. Have some fun, if you’re a loyal reader: take your guesses what they are and see if you’re right. I’ll put the answers underneath the Big Geography Table, where I list the countries that sent readers here and how many they sent.

So the most-read stuff for April was:

So I make out that 45 separate countries sent me readers in April, down from 56 in March and 64 in February. “European Union” remains strangely absent. There were ten single-reader countries, down from 26 in March and 22 in February. Finland, Portugal, Switzerland, Thailand, and Vietnam were single-reader countries last month, and Vietnam is on a three-month streak.

The month started at 48,218 page views from 21,550 logged unique visitors. And I’m listed at having 655 followers on WordPress. You could be among them, by clicking the ‘Follow on WordPress’ button. There’s also a smaller number of e-mail followers, who followed by e-mail instead. There are advantages to following by e-mail, such as that then I don’t know if I’m read at all, and I can’t fix the typos and grammatical messes that I notice only after a post has gone live.

WordPress insights say the most popular day for readership around here in Sunday, when 16 percent of views come in. That’s what I would expect, except that in March the most popular day was Tuesday (18 percent of views), and in February it was Monday (16 percent). These are so close to one-seventh — 14.3 percent — that I figure there’s not any real difference. The most popular hour was that of 6 pm, which is when I normally schedule things to appear. 11 percent of page views came between 6 and 7 pm (Universal Time), down from March’s 12 percent but back to February’s number.

So allow me now to close with some of the search terms bringing people here:

• comic script of the apple by plato (Huh?)
• how many grooves are on a cd
• origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe. (thank goodness)
• worst ways to pack (there’s a lot of room to do badly!)
• puzzle pool ball large table frictionless
• particle theory comic strip (fair enough)

Thanks for being around, though, and thanks for reading this. I’m hoping to get to some more interesting stuff in the Why Stuff Can Orbit series this month and then I’m figuring what I want my big summer project to be. Stick around for updates, please.

• #### Thys 1:40 pm on Wednesday, 10 May, 2017 Permalink | Reply

I’m one of the 7 from South Africa! :D

Like

• #### Joseph Nebus 6:05 pm on Thursday, 11 May, 2017 Permalink | Reply

Aw, nice to see you! Thanks. I just melt into the many United States readers myself.

Liked by 1 person

## Reading the Comics, May 2, 2017: Puzzle Week

If there was a theme this week, it was puzzles. So many strips had little puzzles to work out. You’ll see. Thank you.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 30th of April tries to address my loss of Jumble panels. Thank you, whoever at Comic Strip Master Command passed along word of my troubles. I won’t spoil your fun. As sometimes happens with a Jumble you can work out the joke punchline without doing any of the earlier ones. 64 in binary would be written 1000000. And from this you know what fits in all the circles of the unscrambled numbers. This reduces a lot of the scrambling you have to do: just test whether 341 or 431 is a prime number. Check whether 8802, 8208, or 2808 is divisible by 117. The integer cubed you just have to keep trying possibilities. But only one combination is the cube of an integer. The factorial of 12, just, ugh. At least the circles let you know you’ve done your calculations right.

Steve McGarry’s activity feature Kidtown for the 30th plays with numbers some. And a puzzle that’ll let you check how well you can recognize multiles of four that are somewhere near one another. You can use diagonals too; that’s important to remember.

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute feature for the 30th is also a celebration of numerals. Enjoy the brain teaser about why the encoding makes sense. I don’t believe the hype about NASA engineers needing days to solve a puzzle kids got in minutes. But if it’s believable, is it really hype?

Marty Links’s Emmy Lou from the 29th of October, 1963 was rerun the 2nd of May. It’s a reminder that mathematics teachers of the early 60s also needed something to tape to their doors.

Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures rerun for the 2nd of May is another example of the conflating of “can do arithmetic” with “intelligence”.

Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 2nd name-drops the Null Hypothesis. I’m not sure what Litzler is going for exactly. The Null Hypothesis, though, comes to us from statistics and from inference testing. It turns up everywhere when we sample stuff. It turns up in medicine, in manufacturing, in psychology, in economics. Everywhere we might see something too complicated to run the sorts of unambiguous and highly repeatable tests that physics and chemistry can do — things that are about immediately practical questions — we get to testing inferences. What we want to know is, is this data set something that could plausibly happen by chance? Or is it too far out of the ordinary to be mere luck? The Null Hypothesis is the explanation that nothing’s going on. If your sample is weird in some way, well, everything is weird. What’s special about your sample? You hope to find data that will let you reject the Null Hypothesis, showing that the data you have is so extreme it just can’t plausibly be chance. Or to conclude that you fail to reject the Null Hypothesis, showing that the data is not so extreme that it couldn’t be chance. We don’t accept the Null Hypothesis. We just allow that more data might come in sometime later.

I don’t know what Litzler is going for with this. I feel like I’m missing a reference and I’ll defer to a finance blogger’s Reading the Comics post.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 3rd is another in the string of jokes using arithmetic as source of indisputably true facts. And once again it’s “2 + 2 = 5”. Somehow one plus one never rates in this use.

Aaron Johnson’s W T Duck rerun for the 3rd is the Venn Diagram joke for this week. It’s got some punch to it, too.

Je Mallett’s Frazz for the 5th took me some time to puzzle out. I’ll allow it.

## Why Stuff Can Orbit, Part 8: Introducing Stability

Previously:

I bet you imagined I’d forgot this series, or that I’d quietly dropped it. Not so. I’ve just been finding the energy for this again. 2017 has been an exhausting year.

With the last essay I finished the basic goal of “Why Stuff Can Orbit”. I’d described some of the basic stuff for central forces. These involve something — a planet, a mass on a spring, whatever — being pulled by the … center. Well, you can call anything the origin, the center of your coordinate system. Why put that anywhere but the place everything’s pulled towards? The key thing about a central force is it’s always in the direction of the center. It can be towards the center or away from the center, but it’s always going to be towards the center because the “away from” case is boring. (The thing gets pushed away from the center and goes far off, never to be seen again.) How strongly it’s pulled toward the center changes only with the distance from the center.

Since the force only changes with the distance between the thing and the center it’s easy to think this is a one-dimensional sort of problem. You only need the coordinate describing this distance. We call that ‘r’, because we end up finding orbits that are circles. Since the distance between the center of a circle and its edge is the radius, it would be a shame to use any other letter.

Forces are hard to work with. At least for a lot of stuff. We can represent central forces instead as potential energy. This is easier because potential energy doesn’t have any direction. It’s a lone number. When we can shift something complicated into one number chances are we’re doing well.

But we are describing something in space. Something in three-dimensional space, although it turns out we’ll only need two. We don’t care about stuff that plunges right into the center; that’s boring. We like stuff that loops around and around the center. Circular orbits. We’ve seen that second dimension in the angular momentum, which we represent as ‘L’ for reasons I dunno. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who did. Maybe it was the first letter that came to mind when someone influential wrote a good textbook. Angular momentum is a vector, but for these problems we don’t need to care about that. We can use an ordinary number to carry all the information we need about it.

We get that information from the potential energy plus a term that’s based on the square of the angular momentum divided by the square of the radius. This “effective potential energy” lets us find whether there can be a circular orbit at all, and where it’ll be. And it lets us get some other nice stuff like how the size of the orbit and the time it takes to complete an orbit relate to each other. See the earlier stuff for details. In short, though, we get an equilibrium, a circular orbit, whenever the effective potential energy is flat, neither rising nor falling. That happens when the effective potential energy changes from rising to falling, or changes from falling to rising. Well, if it isn’t rising and if it isn’t falling, what else can it be doing? It only does this for an infinitesimal moment, but that’s all we need. It also happens when the effective potential energy is flat for a while, but that like never happens.

Where I want to go next is into closed orbits. That is, as the planet orbits a sun (or whatever it is goes around whatever it’s going around), does it come back around to exactly where it started? Moving with the same speed in the same direction? That is, does the thing orbit like a planet does?

(Planets don’t orbit like this. When you have three, or more, things in the universe the mathematics of orbits gets way too complicated to do exactly. But this is the thing they’re approximating, we hope, well.)

To get there I’ll have to put back a second dimension. Sorry. Won’t need a third, though. That’ll get named θ because that’s our first choice for an angle. And it makes too much sense to describe a planet’s position as its distance from the center and the angle it makes with respect to some reference line. Which reference line? Whatever works for you. It’s like measuring longitude. We could measure degrees east and west of some point other than Greenwich as well, and as correctly, as we do. We use the one we use because it was convenient.

Along the way to closed orbits I have to talk about stability. There are many kinds of mathematical stability. My favorite is called Lyapunov Stability, because it’s such a mellifluous sound. They all circle around the same concept. It’s what you’d imagine from how we use the word in English. Start with an equilibrium, a system that isn’t changing. Give it a nudge. This disrupts it in some way. Does the disruption stay bounded? That is, does the thing still look somewhat like it did before? Or does the disruption grow so crazy big we have no idea what it’ll ever look like again? (A small nudge, by the way. You can break anything with a big enough nudge; that’s not interesting. It’s whether you can break it with a small nudge that we’d like to know.)

One of the ways we can study this is by looking at the effective potential energy. By its shape we can say whether a central-force equilibrium is stable or not. It’s easy, too, as we’ve got this set up. (Warning before you go passing yourself off as a mathematical physicist: it is not always easy!) Look at the effective potential energy versus the radius. If it has a part that looks like a bowl, cupped upward, it’s got a stable equilibrium. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t have a stable equilibrium. If you aren’t sure, imagine the potential energy was a track, like for a toy car. And imagine you dropped a marble on it. If you give the marble a nudge, does it roll to a stop? If it does, stable. If it doesn’t, unstable.

A phony effective potential energy. Most are a lot less exciting than this; see some of the earlier pieces in this series. But some weird-shaped functions like this were toyed with by physicists in the 19th century who were hoping to understand chemistry. Why should gases behave differently at different temperatures? Why should some combinations of elements make new compounds while others don’t? We needed statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics to explain those, but we couldn’t get there without a lot of attempts and failures at explaining it with potential energies and classical mechanics.

Stable is more interesting. We look at cases where there is this little bowl cupped upward. If we have a tiny nudge we only have to look at a small part of that cup. And that cup is going to look an awful lot like a parabola. If you don’t remember what a parabola is, think back to algebra class. Remember that curvey shape that was the only thing drawn on the board when you were dealing with the quadratic formula? That shape is a parabola.

Who cares about parabolas? We care because we know something good about them. In this context, anyway. The potential energy for a mass on a spring is also a parabola. And we know everything there is to know about masses on springs. Seriously. You’d think it was all physics was about from like 1678 through 1859. That’s because it’s something calculus lets us solve exactly. We don’t need books of complicated integrals or computers to do the work for us.

So here’s what we do. It’s something I did not get clearly when I was first introduced to these concepts. This left me badly confused and feeling lost in my first physics and differential equations courses. We are taking our original physics problem and building a new problem based on it. This new problem looks at how big our nudge away from the equilibrium is. How big the nudge is, how fast it grows, how it changes in time will follow rules. Those rules will look a lot like those for a mass on a spring. We started out with a radius that gives us a perfectly circular orbit. Now we get a secondary problem about how the difference between the nudged and the circular orbit changes in time.

That secondary problem has the same shape, the same equations, as a mass on a spring does. A mass on a spring is a central force problem. All the tools we had for studying central-force problems are still available. There is a new central-force problem, hidden within our original one. Here the “center” is the equilibrium we’re nudged around. It will let us answer a new set of questions.

## Reading the Comics, April 29, 2017: The Other Half Of The Week Edition

I’d been splitting Reading the Comics posts between Sunday and Thursday to better space them out. But I’ve got something prepared that I want to post Thursday, so I’ll bump this up. Also I had it ready to go anyway so don’t gain anything putting it off another two days.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 27th reruns the strip for the 4th of May, 2006. It’s another probability problem, in its way. Assume Jason is honest in reporting whether Paige has picked his number correctly. Assume that Jason picked a whole number. (This is, I think, the weakest assumption. I know Jason Fox’s type and he’s just the sort who’d pick an obscure transcendental number. They’re all obscure after π and e.) Assume that Jason is equally likely to pick any of the whole numbers from 1 to one billion. Then, knowing nothing about what numbers Jason is likely to pick, Paige would have one chance in a billion of picking his number too. Might as well call it certainty that she’ll pay a dollar to play the game. How much would she have to get, in case of getting the number right, to come out even or ahead? … And now we know why Paige is still getting help on probability problems in the 2017 strips.

Jeff Stahler’s Moderately Confused for the 27th gives me a bit of a break by just being a snarky word problem joke. The student doesn’t even have to resist it any.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 29th of April, 2017. And while it’s not a Venn Diagram I’m not sure of a better way to visually represent that the cartoonist is going for. I suppose the intended meaning comes across cleanly enough and that’s the most important thing. It’s a strange state of affairs is all.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 29th also gives me a bit of a break by just being a Venn Diagram-based joke. At least it’s using the shape of a Venn Diagram to deliver the joke. It’s not really got the right content.

Harley Schwadron’s 9 to 5 for the 29th is this week’s joke about arithmetic versus propaganda. It’s a joke we’re never really going to be without again.

## Reading the Comics, April 24, 2017: Reruns Edition

I went a little wild explaining the first of last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. So let me split the week between the strips that I know to have been reruns and the ones I’m not so sure were.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 23rd — not a rerun; the strip is still new on Sundays — is a probability question. And a joke about story problems with relevance. Anyway, the question uses the binomial distribution. I know that because the question is about doing a bunch of things, homework questions, each of which can turn out one of two ways, right or wrong. It’s supposed to be equally likely to get the question right or wrong. It’s a little tedious but not hard to work out the chance of getting exactly six problems right, or exactly seven, or exactly eight, or so on. To work out the chance of getting six or more questions right — the problem given — there’s two ways to go about it.

One is the conceptually easy but tedious way. Work out the chance of getting exactly six questions right. Work out the chance of getting exactly seven questions right. Exactly eight questions. Exactly nine. All ten. Add these chances up. You’ll get to a number slightly below 0.377. That is, Mary Lou would have just under a 37.7 percent chance of passing. The answer’s right and it’s easy to understand how it’s right. The only drawback is it’s a lot of calculating to get there.

So here’s the conceptually harder but faster way. It works because the problem says Mary Lou is as likely to get a problem wrong as right. So she’s as likely to get exactly ten questions right as exactly ten wrong. And as likely to get at least nine questions right as at least nine wrong. To get at least eight questions right as at least eight wrong. You see where this is going: she’s as likely to get at least six right as to get at least six wrong.

There’s exactly three possibilities for a ten-question assignment like this. She can get four or fewer questions right (six or more wrong). She can get exactly five questions right. She can get six or more questions right. The chance of the first case and the chance of the last have to be the same.

So, take 1 — the chance that one of the three possibilities will happen — and subtract the chance she gets exactly five problems right, which is a touch over 24.6 percent. So there’s just under a 75.4 percent chance she does not get exactly five questions right. It’s equally likely to be four or fewer, or six or more. Just-under-75.4 divided by two is just under 37.7 percent, which is the chance she’ll pass as the problem’s given. It’s trickier to see why that’s right, but it’s a lot less calculating to do. That’s a common trade-off.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pax Comix rerun for the 23rd is an aptly titled installment of A Million Monkeys At A Million Typewriters. It reminds me that I don’t remember if I’d retired the monkeys-at-typewriters motif from Reading the Comics collections. If I haven’t I probably should, at least after making a proper essay explaining what the monkeys-at-typewriters thing is all about.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy from the 28th of February, 1978. So, that FoxTrot problem I did? The conceptually-easy-but-tedious way is not too hard to do if you have a calculator. It’s a buch of typing but nothing more. If you don’t have a calculator, though, the desire not to do a whole bunch of calculating could drive you to the conceptually-harder-but-less-work answer. Is that a good thing? I suppose; insight is a good thing to bring. But the less-work answer only works because of a quirk in the problem, that Mary Lou is supposed to have a 50 percent chance of getting a question right. The low-insight-but-tedious problem will aways work. Why skip on having something to do the tedious part?

Ted Shearer’s Quincy from the 28th of February, 1978 reveals to me that pocket calculators were a thing much earlier than I realized. Well, I was too young to be allowed near stuff like that in 1978. I don’t think my parents got their first credit-card-sized, solar-powered calculator that kind of worked for another couple years after that. Kids, ask about them. They looked like good ideas, but you could use them for maybe five minutes before the things came apart. Your cell phone is so much better.

Bil Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes rerun for the 24th can be classed as a resisting-the-word-problem joke. It’s so not about that, but who am I to slow you down from reading a Calvin and Hobbes story?

Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury rerun for the 24th started a story about high school kids and their bad geography skills. I rate it as qualifying for inclusion here because it’s a mathematics teacher deciding to include more geography in his course. I was amused by the week’s jokes anyway. There’s no hint given what mathematics Gil teaches, but given the links between geometry, navigation, and geography there is surely something that could be relevant. It might not help with geographic points like which states are in New England and where they are, though.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 24th is built on a plot point from Carl Sagan’s science fiction novel Contact. In it, a particular “message” is found in the digits of π. (By “message” I mean a string of digits that are interesting to us. I’m not sure that you can properly call something a message if it hasn’t got any sender and if there’s not obviously some intended receiver.) In the book this is an astounding thing because the message can’t be; any reasonable explanation for how it should be there is impossible. But short “messages” are going to turn up in π also, as per the comic strips.

I assume the peer review would correct the cartoon mathematicians’ unfortunate spelling of understanding.

## Reading the Comics, April 22, 2017: Thought There’d Be Some More Last Week Edition

Allison Barrows’s PreTeena rerun for the 18th is a classic syllogism put into the comic strip’s terms. The thing about these sorts of deductive-logic syllogisms is that whether the argument is valid depends only on the shape of the argument. It has nothing to do with whether the thing being discussed makes any sense. This can be disorienting. It’s hard to ignore the everyday meaning of words when you hear a string of sentences. But it’s also hard to parse a string of sentences if the words don’t make sense in them. This is probably part of why on the mathematics side of things logic courses will skimp on syllogisms, using them to give an antique flavor and sense of style to the introduction of courses. It’s easier to use symbolic representations for logic instead.

Randy Glasbergen’s Glasbergen Cartoons rerun for the 20th is the old joke about arithmetic being different between school, government, and corporate work. I haven’t looked at the comments — the GoComics redesign, whatever else it does, makes it very easy to skip the comments — but I’m guessing by the second one someone’s said the Common Core method means getting the most wrong answer.

Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus for the 21st of April, 2017. In fairness, there aren’t a lot of things we need all of 6, 7, and 8 for and you can just use whatever one of those you’re good at for any calculations with the others. Promise.

Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus for the 21st I don’t know is a rerun. But a lot of them are these days. Anyway, it looks like a silly joke about how nice mathematics would be without numbers; Dolly has no idea. I can sympathize with being intimidated by numerals. At the risk of being all New Math-y, I wonder if she wouldn’t like arithmetic more if it were presented as a game. Like, here’s a couple symbols — let’s say * and | for a start, and then some rules. * and * makes *, but * and | makes |. Also | and * makes |. But | and | makes |*. And so on. This is binary arithmetic, disguised, but I wonder if making it look like something inconsequential would make it more pleasant to learn, and if that would transfer over to arithmetic with 1’s and 0’s. Normal, useful arithmetic would be harder to play like this. You’d need ten symbols that are easy to write that aren’t already numbers, letters, or common symbols. But I wonder if it’d be worth it.

Tom Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 22nd is provided for mathematics teachers who need something to tape to their door. You’re welcome.

## What Do I Need To Get A B This Semester? (May 2017 Edition)

That said, everyone wants numbers. So here’s my posts. This is the original, about how to calculate exactly the score you need on your final to get whatever course grade you want. It allows for different sorts of weighting and extra credit and all that. If you don’t want to worry about extra credit here are some tables for common final-exam weightings with which you can approximate your needed score.

Also: review the syllabus. Read and understand any study guides you have. Review the in-course exams and homework assignments. Eat regularly and sleep as fully as you can the week or so before the exam; you do not have any problems that sleep deprivation will make better.

(Yes, this post is early. The schools I’m loosely affiliated with started early this term.)

## Reading the Comics, April 18, 2017: Give Me Some Word Problems Edition

I have my reasons for this installment’s title. They involve my deductions from a comic strip. Give me a few paragraphs.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 16th asks for attention from whatever optician-written blog reads the comics for the eye jokes. And meets both the Venn Diagram and the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons content requirements for this week. Good job! Starts the week off strong.

Lincoln Pierce’s Big Nate: First Class for the 16th, rerunning the strip from 1993, is about impossibly low-probability events. We can read the comic as a joke about extrapolating a sequence from a couple examples. Properly speaking we can’t; any couple of terms can be extended in absolutely any way. But we often suppose a sequence follows some simple pattern, as many real-world things do. I’m going to pretend we can read Jenny’s estimates of the chance she’ll go out with him as at all meaningful. If Jenny’s estimate of the chance she’d go out with Nate rose from one in a trillion to one in a billion over the course of a week, this could be a good thing. If she’s a thousand times more likely each week to date him — if her interest is rising geometrically — this suggests good things for Nate’s ego in three weeks. If she’s only getting 999 trillionths more likely each week — if her interest is rising arithmetically — then Nate has a touch longer to wait before a date becomes likely.

(I forget whether she has agreed to a date in the 24 years since this strip first appeared. He has had some dates with kids in his class, anyway, and some from the next grade too.)

J C Duffy’s Lug Nuts for the 16th is a Pi Day joke that ran late.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 17th starts a little thread about obsolete references in story problems. It’s continued on the 18th. I’m sympathetic in principle to both sides of the story problem debate.

Is the point of the first problem, Farmer Joe’s apples, to see whether a student can do a not-quite-long division? Or is it to see whether the student can extract a price-per-quantity for something, and apply that to find the quantity to fit a given price? If it’s the latter then the numbers don’t make a difference. One would want to avoid marking down a student who knows what to do, and could divide 15 cents by three, but would freeze up if a more plausible price of, say, $2.25 per pound had to be divided by three. But then the second problem, Mr Schad driving from Belmont to Cadillac, got me wondering. It is about 84 miles between the two Michigan cities (and there is a Reed City along the way). The time it takes to get from one city to another is a fair enough problem. But these numbers don’t make sense. At 55 miles per hour the trip takes an awful 1.5273 hours. Who asks elementary school kids to divide 84 by 55? On purpose? But at the state highway speed limit (for cars) of 70 miles per hour, the travel time is 1.2 hours. 84 divided by 70 is a quite reasonable thing to ask elementary school kids to do. And then I thought of this: you could say Belmont and Cadillac are about 88 miles apart. Google Maps puts the distance as 86.8 miles, along US 131; but there’s surely some point in the one town that’s exactly 88 miles from some point in the other, just as there’s surely some point exactly 84 miles from some point in the other town. 88 divided by 55 would be another reasonable problem for an elementary school student; 1.6 hours is a reasonable answer. The (let’s call it) 1980s version of the question ought to see the car travel 88 miles at 55 miles per hour. The contemporary version ought to see the car travel 84 miles at 70 miles per hour. No reasonable version would make it 84 miles at 55 miles per hour. So did Mallett take a story problem that could actually have been on an era-appropriate test and ancient it up? Before anyone reports me to Comic Strip Master Command let me clarify what I’m wondering about. I don’t care if the details of the joke don’t make perfect sense. They’re jokes, not instruction. All the story problem needs to set up the joke is the obsolete speed limit; everything else is fluff. And I enjoyed working out variation of the problem that did make sense, so I’m happy Mallett gave me that to ponder. Here’s what I do wonder about. I’m curious if story problems are getting an unfair reputation. I’m not an elementary school teacher, or parent of a kid in school. I would like to know what the story problems look like. Do you, the reader, have recent experience with the stuff farmers, drivers, and people weighing things are doing in these little stories? Are they measuring things that people would plausibly care about today, and using values that make sense for the present day? I’d like to know what the state of story problems is. John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee for the 18th of April, 2017. Before you ask what exactly the old theory of avocado intelligence was remember that Edison Lee’s lab partner there is a talking rat. Just saying. John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee for the 18th uses mental arithmetic as the gauge of intelligence. Pretty harsly, too. I wouldn’t have known the square root of 8649 off the top of my head either, although it’s easy to tell that 92 can’t be right: the last digit of 92 squared has to be 4. It’s also easy to tell that 92 has to be about right, though, as 90 times 90 will be about 8100. Given this information, if you knew that 8,649 was a perfect square, you’d be hard-pressed to think of a better guess for its value than 93. But since most whole numbers are not perfect squares, “a little over 90” is the best I’d expect to do. • #### Joseph Nebus 6:00 pm on Friday, 21 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply Tags: calculus ( 81 ), Klein bottles ( 2 ), Mobius strips, vectors ( 13 ) ## In Which I Offer Excuses Instead Of Mathematics I’d been hoping to get back into longer-form essays. And then the calculations I meant to do on one problem turned out more complicated than I’d wanted. And they’re hard to square with the approach I used in some earlier work. Not that the results I was looking at were wrong, mind, just that an approach I’d used as “convenient for this sort of problem” turned inconvenient here. So while I have the whole piece back in the shop for re-thinking, which is harder than even thinking, let me give you some other stuff to read. Or look at. One is from regular Singaporean correspondent MathTuition88. If you know anything about topology it’s because you’ve heard about Möbius strips. Surfaces with a single side are neat, and form the base of 95 percent of all science fiction stories in which the mathematics is the fantastic element. Klein bottles are often mentioned as a four-dimensional analogue to the Möbius strip, a solid object with no distinguishable interior or exterior. And a Klein bottle can be divided into two Möbius strips. MathTuition88 showcases a picture about how to turn two strips into a bottle. Or at least the best approximation of a bottle we can do; the actual Klein bottle is a four-dimensional structure and we can just make a three-dimensional imitation of the thing. For something a bit more vector-analytic Joe Heafner’s Tensor Time has an essay about vectors. It’s about Heafner’s dislike for the way some vector problems are presented. Some common and easy ways to solve vector equations lead to spurious solutions that have to be weeded out by ad hoc reasoning; can’t we do better? Heafner argues that we can and should. The suggested alternative looks a little stuffy, but as often happens, spending more time on the setup means one spends less time confused later on. Worth pondering. And this is a late addition, but I couldn’t resist. Now I have a new favorite first chapter for a calculus text. • #### sheldonk2014 7:43 pm on Monday, 1 May, 2017 Permalink | Reply Thank you for visiting Joseph Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you But I know you understand As Sheldon Always Like • #### Joseph Nebus 3:23 am on Tuesday, 9 May, 2017 Permalink | Reply Oh yes. Nothing you ever need to apologize for. I don’t check in on everyone often enough myself. Just glad you’re here and basically all right. Like • #### Joseph Nebus 6:00 pm on Tuesday, 18 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply Tags: calendars ( 11 ), Duncan Steel, Easter, Gregorian calendar ( 5 ), Karl Friedrich Gauss ( 2 ) ## What Is The Most Probable Date For Easter? What Is The Least? If I’d started pondering the question a week earlier I’d have a nice timely post. Too bad. Shouldn’t wait nearly a year to use this one, though. My love and I got talking about early and late Easters. We know that we’re all but certainly not going to be alive to see the earliest possible Easter, at least not unless the rule for setting the date of Easter changes. Easter can be as early as the 22nd of March or as late as the 25th of April. Nobody presently alive has seen a 22nd of March Easter; the last one was in 1818. Nobody presently alive will; the next will be 2285. The last time Easter was its latest date was 1943; the next time will be 2038. I know people who’ve seen the one in 1943 and hope to make it at least through 2038. But that invites the question: what dates are most likely to be Easter? What ones are least? In a sense the question is nonsense. The rules establishing Easter and the Gregorian calendar are known. To speak of the “chance” of a particular day being Easter is like asking the probability that Grover Cleveland was president of the United States in 1894. Technically there’s a probability distribution there. But it’s different in some way from asking the chance of rolling at least a nine on a pair of dice. But as with the question about what day is most likely to be Thanksgiving we can make the question sensible. We have to take the question to mean “given a month and day, and no information about what year it is, what is the chance that this as Easter?” (I’m still not quite happy with that formulation. I’d be open to a more careful phrasing, if someone’s got one.) When we’ve got that, though, we can tackle the problem. We could do as I did for working out what days are most likely to be Thanksgiving. Run through all the possible configurations of the calendar, tally how often each of the days in the range is Easter, and see what comes up most often. There’s a hassle here. Working out the date of Easter follows a rule, yes. The rule is that it’s the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. There are wrinkles, mostly because the Moon is complicated. A notional Moon that’s a little more predictable gets used instead. There are algorithms you can use to work out when Easter is. They all look like some kind of trick being used to put something over on you. No matter. They seem to work, as far as we know. I found some Matlab code that uses the Easter-computing routine that Karl Friedrich Gauss developed and that’ll do. Problem. The Moon and the Earth follow cycles around the sun, yes. Wait long enough and the positions of the Earth and Moon and Sun. This takes 532 years and is known as the Paschal Cycle. In the Julian calendar Easter this year is the same date it was in the year 1485, and the same it will be in 2549. It’s no particular problem to set a computer program to run a calculation, even a tedious one, 532 times. But it’s not meaningful like that either. The problem is the Julian calendar repeats itself every 28 years, which fits nicely with the Paschal Cycle. The Gregorian calendar, with different rules about how to handle century years like 1900 and 2100, repeats itself only every 400 years. So it takes much longer to complete the cycle and get Earth, Moon, and calendar date back to the same position. To fully account for all the related cycles would take 5,700,000 years, estimates Duncan Steel in Marking Time: The Epic Quest To Invent The Perfect Calendar. Write code to calculate Easter on a range of years and you can do that, of course. It’s no harder to calculate the dates of Easter for six million years than it is for six hundred years. It just takes longer to finish. The problem is that it is meaningless to do so. Over the course of a mere(!) 26,000 years the precession of the Earth’s axes will change the times of the seasons completely. If we still use the Gregorian calendar there will be a time that late September is the start of the Northern Hemisphere’s spring, and another time that early February is the heart of the Canadian summer. Within five thousand years we will have to change the calendar, change the rule for computing Easter, or change the idea of it as happening in Europe’s early spring. To calculate a date for Easter of the year 5,002,017 is to waste energy. We probably don’t need it anyway, though. The differences between any blocks of 532 years are, I’m going to guess, minor things. I would be surprised if the frequency of any date’s appearance changed more than a quarter of a percent. That might scramble the rankings of dates if we have several nearly-as-common dates, but it won’t be much. So let me do that. Here’s a table of how often each particular calendar date appears as Easter from the years 2000 to 5000, inclusive. And I don’t believe that by the year we would call 5000 we’ll still have the same calendar and Easter and expectations of Easter all together, so I’m comfortable overlooking that. Indeed, I expect we’ll have some different calendar or Easter or expectation of Easter by the year 4985 at the latest. For this enormous date range, though, here’s the frequency of Easters on each possible date: • Country Views United States 609 India 58 United Kingdom 39 Canada 38 Singapore 29 Germany 24 Austria 18 Australia 17 Slovenia 14 Puerto Rico 11 France 10 Romania 10 Sweden 10 Hong Kong SAR China 9 Spain 8 Philippines 7 South Africa 7 Brazil 6 Greece 6 Italy 6 New Zealand 6 Croatia 4 Japan 4 Malaysia 4 Russia 4 Denmark 3 Netherlands 3 Taiwan 3 Belgium 2 Indonesia 2 Ireland 2 Israel 2 Lebanon 2 Poland 2 Turkey 2 Argentina 1 Cyprus 1 Finland 1 (*) Pakistan 1 Portugal 1 (*) South Korea 1 Switzerland 1 (*) Thailand 1 (*) United Arab Emirates 1 Vietnam 1 (**) Date Number Of Occurrences, 2000 – 5000 Probability Of Occurence 22 March 12 0.400% 23 March 17 0.566% 24 March 41 1.366% 25 March 74 2.466% 26 March 75 2.499% 27 March 68 2.266% 28 March 90 2.999% 29 March 110 3.665% 30 March 114 3.799% 31 March 99 3.299% 1 April 87 2.899% 2 April 83 2.766% 3 April 106 3.532% 4 April 112 3.732% 5 April 110 3.665% 6 April 92 3.066% 7 April 86 2.866% 8 April 98 3.266% 9 April 112 3.732% 10 April 114 3.799% 11 April 96 3.199% 12 April 88 2.932% 13 April 90 2.999% 14 April 108 3.599% 15 April 117 3.899% 16 April 104 3.466% 17 April 90 2.999% 18 April 93 3.099% 19 April 114 3.799% 20 April 116 3.865% 21 April 93 3.099% 22 April 60 1.999% 23 April 46 1.533% 24 April 57 1.899% 25 April 29 0.966% Dates of Easter from 2000 through 5000. Computed using Gauss’s algorithm. If I haven’t missed anything, this indicates that the 15th of April is the most likely date for Easter, with the 20th close behind and the 10th and 14th hardly rare. The least probable date is the 22nd of March, with the 23rd of March and the 25th of April almost as unlikely. And since the date range does affect the results, here’s a smaller sampling, one closer fit to the dates of anyone alive to read this as I publish. For the years 1925 through 2100 the appearance of each Easter date are: Date Number Of Occurrences, 1925 – 2100 Probability Of Occurence 22 March 0 0.000% 23 March 1 0.568% 24 March 1 0.568% 25 March 3 1.705% 26 March 6 3.409% 27 March 3 1.705% 28 March 5 2.841% 29 March 6 3.409% 30 March 7 3.977% 31 March 7 3.977% 1 April 6 3.409% 2 April 4 2.273% 3 April 6 3.409% 4 April 6 3.409% 5 April 7 3.977% 6 April 7 3.977% 7 April 4 2.273% 8 April 4 2.273% 9 April 6 3.409% 10 April 7 3.977% 11 April 7 3.977% 12 April 7 3.977% 13 April 4 2.273% 14 April 6 3.409% 15 April 7 3.977% 16 April 6 3.409% 17 April 7 3.977% 18 April 6 3.409% 19 April 6 3.409% 20 April 6 3.409% 21 April 7 3.977% 22 April 5 2.841% 23 April 2 1.136% 24 April 2 1.136% 25 April 2 1.136% Dates of Easter from 1925 through 2100. Computed using Gauss’s algorithm. If we take this as the “working lifespan” of our common experience then the 22nd of March is the least likely Easter we’ll see, as we never do. The 23rd and 24th are the next least likely Easter. There’s a ten-way tie for the most common date of Easter, if I haven’t missed one or more. But the 30th and 31st of March, and the 5th, 6th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 15th, 17th, and 21st of April each turn up seven times in this range. The Julian calendar Easter dates are different and perhaps I’ll look at that sometime. • #### ksbeth 7:34 pm on Tuesday, 18 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply Very interesting Liked by 1 person • #### Joseph Nebus 3:31 am on Wednesday, 19 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply Thank you! Liked by 1 person • #### mx. fluffy 💜 (@fluffy) 11:51 pm on Thursday, 20 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply I’m surprised there’s such a periodicity in the modal peaks! What happens if you extend the computations out for a few more millennia? Do they even out or get even more pronounced? Like • #### Joseph Nebus 2:59 am on Tuesday, 25 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply I’m surprised by it too, yes. If we pretend that the current scheme for calculating Easter would be meaningful, then, extended over the full 5,700,000-year cycle … the peaks don’t disappear. The 19th of April turns up as Easter about 3.9 percent of the time. Next most likely are the 18th, 17th, 15th, 12th, and 10th of April. I don’t know just what causes this. I suspect it’s some curious interaction between the 19-year Metonic cycle of the lunar behavior and the very slight asymmetries the Gregorian calendar. The 21st of March is a tiny bit more likely to be a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Sunday than it is any other day of the week. My hunch is these combine to make the little peaks that linger. The 22nd of March and 25th of April are the least common Easters; the 23rd and 24th of March, then 24th of April, come slightly more commonly. Like • #### Joseph Nebus 6:00 pm on Sunday, 16 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply Tags: Amanda the Great, Andertoons ( 8 ), Archie ( 2 ), Brevity ( 4 ), Calvin and Hobbes ( 5 ), dimensions ( 11 ), Euclid ( 3 ), Gentle Creatures ( 2 ), linear algebra ( 6 ), Loose Parts ( 4 ), Skin Horse, story problems ( 4 ), Strange Brew, Super-Fun-Pak Comix ( 3 ) ## Reading the Comics, April 15, 2017: Extended Week Edition It turns out last Saturday only had the one comic strip that was even remotely on point for me. And it wasn’t very on point either, but since it’s one of the Creators.com strips I’ve got the strip to show. That’s enough for me. Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 8th is just about how algebra hurts. Some days I agree. Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 8th of April, 2017. Do you suppose Archie knew that Dilton was listening there, or was he just emoting his fatigue to himself? Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 8th is an installation of They Came From The Third Dimension. “Dimension” is one of those oft-used words that’s come loose of any technical definition. We use it in mathematics all the time, at least once we get into Introduction to Linear Algebra. That’s the course that talks about how blocks of space can be stretched and squashed and twisted into each other. You’d expect this to be a warmup act to geometry, and I guess it’s relevant. But where it really pays off is in studying differential equations and how systems of stuff changes over time. When you get introduced to dimensions in linear algebra they describe degrees of freedom, or how much information you need about a problem to pin down exactly one solution. It does give mathematicians cause to talk about “dimensions of space”, though, and these are intuitively at least like the two- and three-dimensional spaces that, you know, stuff moves in. That there could be more dimensions of space, ordinarily inaccessible, is an old enough idea we don’t really notice it. Perhaps it’s hidden somewhere too. Amanda El-Dweek’s Amanda the Great of the 9th started a story with the adult Becky needing to take a mathematics qualification exam. It seems to be prerequisite to enrolling in some new classes. It’s a typical set of mathematics anxiety jokes in the service of a story comic. One might tsk Becky for going through university without ever having a proper mathematics class, but then, I got through university without ever taking a philosophy class that really challenged me. Not that I didn’t take the classes seriously, but that I took stuff like Intro to Logic that I was already conversant in. We all cut corners. It’s a shame not to use chances like that, but there’s always so much to do. Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 10th relieves the worry that Mark Anderson’s Andertoons might not have got in an appearance this week. It’s your common kid at the chalkboard sort of problem, this one a kid with no idea where to put the decimal. As always happens I’m sympathetic. The rules about where to move decimals in this kind of multiplication come out really weird if the last digit, or worse, digits in the product are zeroes. Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures is in reruns. The strip from the 10th is part of a story I’m so sure I’ve featured here before that I’m not even going to look up when it aired. But it uses your standard story problem to stand in for science-fiction gadget mathematics calculation. Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 12th is the natural extension of sleep numbers. Yes, I’m relieved to see Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts around here again too. Feels weird when it’s not. Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes rerun for the 13th is a resisting-the-story-problem joke. But Calvin resists so very well. John Deering’s Strange Brew for the 13th is a “math club” joke featuring horses. Oh, it’s a big silly one, but who doesn’t like those too? Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 14th is one of the small set of punning jokes you can make using mathematician names. Good for the wall of a mathematics teacher’s classroom. Shaenon K Garrity and Jefferey C Wells’s Skin Horse for the 14th is set inside a virtual reality game. (This is why there’s talk about duplicating objects.) Within the game, the characters are playing that game where you start with a set number (in this case 20) tokens and take turn removing a couple of them. The “rigged” part of it is that the house can, by perfect play, force a win every time. It’s a bit of game theory that creeps into recreational mathematics books and that I imagine is imprinted in the minds of people who grow up to design games. • #### Joseph Nebus 6:00 pm on Friday, 14 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply Tags: complex numbers ( 7 ), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ( 7 ), history of mathematics ( 3 ), imaginary numbers ( 6 ), logarithms ( 18 ) ## What Is The Logarithm of a Negative Number? Learning of imaginary numbers, things created to be the square roots of negative numbers, inspired me. It probably inspires anyone who’s the sort of person who’d become a mathematician. The trick was great. I wondered could I do it? Could I find some other useful expansion of the number system? The square root of a complex-valued number sounded like the obvious way to go, until a little later that week when I learned that’s just some other complex-valued numbers. The next thing I hit on: how about the logarithm of a negative number? Couldn’t that be a useful expansion of numbers? No. It turns out you can make a sensible logarithm of negative, and complex-valued, numbers using complex-valued numbers. Same with trigonometric and inverse trig functions, tangents and arccosines and all that. There isn’t anything we can do with the normal mathematical operations that needs something bigger than the complex-valued numbers to play with. It’s possible to expand on the complex-valued numbers. We can make quaternions and some more elaborate constructs there. They don’t solve any particular shortcoming in complex-valued numbers, but they’ve got their uses. I never got anywhere near reinventing them. I don’t regret the time spent on that. There’s something useful in trying to invent something even if it fails. One problem with mathematics — with all intellectual fields, really — is that it’s easy, when teaching, to give the impression that this stuff is the Word of God, built into the nature of the universe and inarguable. It’s so not. The stuff we find interesting and how we describe those things are the results of human thought, attempts to say what is interesting about a thing and what is useful. And what best approximates our ideas of what we would like to know. So I was happy to see this come across my Twitter feed: The links to a 12-page paper by Deepak Bal, Leibniz, Bernoulli, and the Logarithms of Negative Numbers. It’s a review of how the idea of a logarithm of a negative number got developed over the course of the 18th century. And what great minds, like Gottfried Leibniz and John (I) Bernoulli argued about as they find problems with the implications of what they were doing. (There were a lot of Bernoullis doing great mathematics, and even multiple John Bernoullis. The (I) is among the ways we keep them sorted out.) It’s worth a read, I think, even if you’re not all that versed in how to calculate logarithms. (but if you’d like to be better-versed, here’s the tail end of some thoughts about that.) The process of how a good idea like this comes to be is worth knowing. Also: it turns out there’s not “the” logarithm of a complex-valued number. There’s infinitely many logarithms. But they’re a family, all strikingly similar, so we can pick one that’s convenient and just use that. Ask if you’re really interested. • #### Joseph Nebus 6:00 pm on Wednesday, 12 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply Tags: conjectures ( 8 ), popularization ( 2 ), statistics ( 59 ) ## Did This German Retiree Solve A Decades-Old Conjecture? And then this came across my desktop (my iPad’s too old to work with the Twitter client anymore): The underlying news is that one Thomas Royen, a Frankfurt (Germany)-area retiree, seems to have proven the Gaussian Correlation Inequality. It wasn’t a conjecture that sounded familiar to me, but the sidebar (on the Quanta Magazine article to which I’ve linked there) explains it and reminds me that I had heard about it somewhere or other. It’s about random variables. That is, things that can take on one of a set of different values. If you think of them as the measurements of something that’s basically consistent but never homogenous you’re doing well. Suppose you have two random variables, two things that can be measured. There’s a probability the first variable is in a particular range, greater than some minimum and less than some maximum. There’s a probability the second variable is in some other particular range. What’s the probability that both variables are simultaneously in these particular ranges? This is easy to answer for some specific cases. For example if the two variables have nothing to do with each other then everybody who’s taken a probability class knows. The probability of both variables being in their ranges is the probability the first is in its range times the probability the second is in its range. The challenge is telling whether it’s always true, whether the variables are related to each other or not. Or telling when it’s true if it isn’t always. The article (and pop reporting on this) is largely about how the proof has gone unnoticed. There’s some interesting social dynamics going on there. Royen published in an obscure-for-the-field journal, one he was an editor for; this makes it look dodgy, at least. And the conjecture’s drawn “proofs” that were just wrong; this discourages people from looking for obscurely-published proofs. Some of the articles I’ve seen on this make Royen out to be an amateur. And I suppose there is a bias against amateurs in professional mathematics. There is in every field. It’s true that mathematics doesn’t require professional training the way that, say, putting out oil rig fires does. Anyone capable of thinking through an argument rigorously is capable of doing important original work. But there are a lot of tricks to thinking an argument through that are important, and I’d bet on the person with training. In any case, Royen isn’t a newcomer to the field who just heard of an interesting puzzle. He’d been a statistician, first for a pharmaceutical company and then for a technical university. He may not have a position or tie to a mathematics department or a research organization but he’s someone who would know roughly what to do. So did he do it? I don’t know; I’m not versed enough in the field to say. It’s interesting to see if he has. • #### mathtuition88 4:29 am on Thursday, 13 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply He seems to have a PhD earned in 1975. (http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=134663). Like • #### Joseph Nebus 5:32 am on Friday, 14 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply Ah, thank you! I appreciate the reassurance that he wasn’t wholly an amateur or someone whose expertise came from on-the-job training. Liked by 1 person • #### Joseph Nebus 6:00 pm on Sunday, 9 April, 2017 Permalink | Reply Tags: Bloom County ( 3 ), chess, Family Circus ( 2 ), lotteries ( 5 ), Magic In A Minute ( 4 ), Mustard and Boloney, Reality Check ( 5 ), Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal ( 9 ), sequences ( 5 ), Take It From The Tinkersons, TruthFacts ( 3 ) ## Reading the Comics, April 6, 2017: Abbreviated Week Edition I’m writing this a little bit early because I’m not able to include the Saturday strips in the roundup. There won’t be enough to make a split week edition; I’ll just add the Saturday strips to next week’s report. In the meanwhile: Mac King and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute for the 2nd is a magic trick, as the name suggests. It figures out a card by way of shuffling a (partial) deck and getting three (honest) answers from the other participant. If I’m not counting wrongly, you could do this trick with up to 27 cards and still get the right card after three answers. I feel like there should be a way to explain this that’s grounded in information theory, but I’m not able to put that together. I leave the suggestion here for people who see the obvious before I get to it. Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus (probable) rerun for the 6th reassured me that this was not going to be a single-strip week. And a dubiously included single strip at that. I’m not sure that lotteries are the best use of the knowledge of numbers, but they’re a practical use anyway. Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus for the 6th of April, 2017. I’m not familiar enough with the evolution of the Family Circus style to say whether this is a rerun, a newly-drawn strip, or an old strip with a new caption. I suppose there is a certain timelessness to it, at least once we get into the era when states sported lotteries again. Bill Bettwy’s Take It From The Tinkersons for the 6th is part of the universe of students resisting class. I can understand the motivation problem in caring about numbers of apples that satisfy some condition. In the role of distinct objects whose number can be counted or deduced cards are as good as apples. In the role of things to gamble on, cards open up a lot of probability questions. Counting cards is even about how the probability of future events changes as information about the system changes. There’s a lot worth learning there. I wouldn’t try teaching it to elementary school students. Bill Bettwy’s Take It From The Tinkersons for the 6th of April, 2017. That tree in the third panel is a transplant from a Slylock Fox six-differences panel. They’ve been trying to rebuild the population of trees that are sometimes three triangles and sometimes four triangles tall. Jeffrey Caulfield and Alexandre Rouillard’s Mustard and Boloney for the 6th uses mathematics as the stuff know-it-alls know. At least I suppose it is; Doctor Know It All speaks of “the pathagorean principle”. I’m assuming that’s meant to be the Pythagorean theorem, although the talk about “in any right triangle the area … ” skews things. You can get to stuf about areas of triangles from the Pythagorean theorem. One of the shorter proofs of it depends on the areas of the squares of the three sides of a right triangle. But it’s not what people typically think of right away. But he wouldn’t be the first know-it-all to start blathering on the assumption that people aren’t really listening. It’s common enough to suppose someone who speaks confidently and at length must know something. Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 6th is a welcome return to anthropomorphic-numerals humor. Been a while. Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 6th builds on the form of a classic puzzle, about a sequence indexed to the squares of a chessboard. The story being riffed on is a bit of mathematical legend. The King offered the inventor of chess any reward. The inventor asked for one grain of wheat for the first square, two grains for the second square, four grains for the third square, eight grains for the fourth square, and so on, through all 64 squares. An extravagant reward, but surely one within the king’s power to grant, right? And of course not: by the 64th doubling the amount of wheat involved is so enormous it’s impossibly great wealth. The father’s offer is meant to evoke that. But he phrases it in a deceptive way, “one penny for the first square, two for the second, and so on”. That “and so on” is the key. Listing a sequence and ending “and so on” is incomplete. The sequence can go in absolutely any direction after the given examples and not be inconsistent. There is no way to pick a single extrapolation as the only logical choice. We do it anyway, though. Even mathematicians say “and so on”. This is because we usually stick to a couple popular extrapolations. We suppose things follow a couple common patterns. They’re polynomials. Or they’re exponentials. Or they’re sine waves. If they’re polynomials, they’re lower-order polynomials. Things like that. Most of the time we’re not trying to trick our fellow mathematicians. Or we know we’re modeling things with some physical base and we have reason to expect some particular type of function. In this case, the$1.27 total is consistent with getting two cents for every chess square after the first. There are infinitely many other patterns that would work, and the kid would have been wise to ask for what precisely “and so on” meant before choosing.

Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County 2017 for the 7th is the climax of a little story in which Oliver Wendell Holmes has been annoying people by shoving scientific explanations of things into their otherwise pleasant days. It’s a habit some scientifically-minded folks have, and it’s an annoying one. Many of us outgrow it. Anyway, this strip is about the curious evidence suggesting that the universe is not just expanding, but accelerating its expansion. There are mathematical models which allow this to happen. When developing General Relativity, Albert Einstein included a Cosmological Constant for little reason besides that without it, his model would suggest the universe was of a finite age and had expanded from an infinitesimally small origin. He had grown up without anyone knowing of any evidence that the size of the universe was a thing that could change.

Anyway, the Cosmological Constant is a puzzle. We can find values that seem to match what we observe, but we don’t know of a good reason it should be there. We sciencey types like to have models that match data, but we appreciate more knowing why the models look like that and not anything else. So it’s a good problem some of the cosmologists have been working on. But we’ve been here before. A great deal of physics, especially in the 20th Century, has been driven by looking for reasons behind what look like arbitrary points in a successful model. If Oliver were better-versed in the history of science — something scientifically minded people are often weak on, myself included — he’d be less easily taunted by Opus.

Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler’s TruthFacts for the 7th thinks that we forgot they ran this same strip back on the 17th of March. I spotted it, though. Nyah.

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