Folks who’ve been with me a long while know one of my happy Christmastime traditions is watching the Aardman Animation film Arthur Christmas. The film also gave me a great mathematical-physics question. You might consider some questions it raises. First: Could `Arthur Christmas’ Happen In Real Life? There’s a spot in the movie when Arthur … Continue reading “To repeat my thoughts about Arthur Christmas”
Folks who’ve been with me a long while know one of my happy Christmastime traditions is watching the Aardman Animation film Arthur Christmas. The film also gave me a great mathematical-physics question. You should watch the movie, but you might also consider the questions it raises. First: Could `Arthur Christmas’ Happen In Real Life? There’s … Continue reading “Just reminding you that you could watch Arthur Christmas”
I don’t know how you spend your December, but part of it really ought to be done watching the Aardman Animation film Arthur Christmas. It inspired me to ponder a mathematical-physics question that got into some heady territory and this is a good time to point people back to that. The first piece is Could … Continue reading “The Arthur Christmas Season”
Since it’s the week for this, I would like to remind folks they could be watching the Aardman Animation film Arthur Christmas. Also, I was able to spin out a couple of mathematical and physics questions from one scene in the film. Last year I collected links to the essays — there’s five of them … Continue reading “Bringing Up Arthur Christmas Again”
Since it’s the season for it I’d like to point new or new-wish readers to a couple of posts I did in 2012-13, based on the Aardman Animation film Arthur Christmas, which was just so very charming in every way. It also puts forth some good mathematical and mathematical-physics questions. Opening the scene is “Could … Continue reading “The Arthur Christmas Problem”
In working out my little Arthur Christmas-inspired problem, I argued that if the reindeer take some nice rational number of hours to complete one orbit of the Earth, eventually they’ll meet back up with Arthur and Grand-Santa stranded on the ground. And if the reindeer take an irrational number of hours to make one orbit, … Continue reading “Arthur Christmas and the End of Time”
I left Arthur Christmas and Grand-Santa in a hypothetical puzzle, inspired by the movie, with them stranded on a tiny island while their team of flying reindeer and sleigh carried on in a straight line without them. I am assuming for the sake of an interesting problem that this means the reindeer are carrying on … Continue reading “Arthur Christmas and the Least Common Multiple”
As promised, since I’ve got the chance, I want to return to the question of the reindeer behavior as shown in the Aardman movie Arthur Christmas, and what would ultimately happen to them if the reindeer carry on as Grand-Santa claims they will. (Again, this does require spoiling a plot point of the film and … Continue reading “Returning to Arthur Christmas”
If you haven’t seen the Aardman Animation movie Arthur Christmas, first, shame on you as it’s quite fun. But also you may wish to think carefully before reading this entry, and a few I project to follow, as it takes one plot point from the film which I think has some interesting mathematical implications, reaching … Continue reading “Could “Arthur Christmas” Happen In Real Life?”
Previously: Laying Some Groundwork Why Stuff Can’t Orbit It Turns Out Spinning Matters On The L Why Physics Doesn’t Work And What To Do About It Circles and Where To Find Them ALL the Circles Introducing Stability How The Spring In The Cosmos Behaves Where Time Comes From And How It Changes Things And the … Continue reading “Why Stuff Can Orbit, Part 11: In Search Of Closure”
August was my first full month after the end of the A-to-Z project. How would dropping from the nearly-daily publication in June and early July to a relatively sedate three times a week affect my readership and reader engagement? As ever, the data is mixed. According to WordPress’s counters, the number of page views rose … Continue reading “How August 2015 Treated My Mathematics Blog”
I haven’t had the chance to read today’s comics, what with it having snowed just enough last night that we have to deal with it instead of waiting for the sun to melt it, so, let me go with what I have. There’s a sad lack of strips I feel justified including the images of, … Continue reading “Reading the Comics, February 14, 2015: Valentine’s Eve Edition”
I reached my 20,000th view around here sometime on the final day of 2014, which is an appealingly tidy coincidence. I’m glad for it. It also gives me a starting point to review the blog’s statistics, as gathered by WordPress, which is trying to move us to a new and perfectly awful statistics page that … Continue reading “20,000: My Math Blog’s Statistics”
Originally posted on Complex Projective 4-Space:
Suppose we have a circular track occupied by finitely many trains of various lengths travelling at the same speed. The trains collide elastically with each other. If the sum of the lengths of the trains is a rational multiple of the track length, then it can be proved that…
There’s a hopeful trend in my readership statistics for December 2013 around these parts: according to WordPress, my number of readers grew from 308 in November to 352 and the number of unique visitors grew from 158 to 176. Even the number of views per visitor grew, from 1.95 to 2.00. None of these are … Continue reading “December 2013’s Statistics”
Let me return, reindeer-like, to my problem, pretty well divorced from the movie at this point, of the stranded Arthur Christmas and Grand-Santa, stuck to wherever they happen to be on the surface of the Earth, going around the Earth’s axis of rotation every 86,164 seconds, while their reindeer and sleigh carry on orbiting the … Continue reading “Six Minutes Off”
To get to my next point about Arthur Christmas I needed to know how fast an arbitrary point on the Earth is moving, as the Earth rotates. This required me getting out a sheet of paper and doing some sketches, so, I figured it’s worth a side article to explain what I was doing. The … Continue reading “How Fast Is The Earth Spinning?”
Beth, author of the popular inspiration blog I Didn’t Have My Glasses On …. proposed this topic. Hilbert’s problems are a famous set of questions. I couldn’t hope to summarize them all in an essay of reasonable length. I’d have trouble to do them justice in a short book. But there are still things to … Continue reading “My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Hilbert’s Problems”
Dina Yagodich gave me the topic for today. She keeps up a YouTube channel with a variety of interesting videos. And she did me a favor. I’ve been thinking a long while to write a major post about this theorem. Its subject turns up so often. I’d wanted to have a good essay about it. … Continue reading “My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Infinite Monkey Theorem”
Well, I did say we were getting to the end of summer. It’s taken only a couple days to get a fresh batch of enough mathematics-themed comics to include here, although the majority of them are about mathematics in ways that we’ve seen before, sometimes many times. I suppose that’s fair; it’s hard to keep … Continue reading “Reading the Comics, August 29, 2014: Recurring Jokes Edition”
