Old Blogs for "Spree"
January 21, 2007
Last Friday's show and next Friday's are repeats. The main math involves "pursuit curves" which I discussed in the four blogs for last September (2006). Write if you have questions. More later.
Your blogmeister
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||
This is a blog where a professor from Northeastern University's Math department posts mathematical comments on the television show "Numb3rs". To comment, write to bridger@neu.edu.
Unique visitors since 6/14/2005:
January 21, 2007
Last Friday's show and next Friday's are repeats. The main math involves "pursuit curves" which I discussed in the four blogs for last September (2006). Write if you have questions. More later.
Your blogmeister
January 13, 2007
Fluid dynamics is the study of the forces and velocities of fluids -- see the blog Fluid Dynamics (5/13/06) . It is a branch of physics which, on the one hand, uses lots of deep and theoretical mathematics and on the other hand has many applications to engineering. Because air and other gases can be considered very low-density fluids, it also contains the field of aerodynamics... continued »
January 9, 2007
One aspect of last week's show was mathematical genetics. This has become a very complicated field since we now know a lot more about DNA and molecular biology in general.
I am not a biologist, but here is a somewhat simplified idea of classical genetics. (I welcome clarifications from any experts out there.)
Our cells carry structures called chromosomes which are themselves made up of very complicated arrangements of molecules called genes... continued »
January 3, 2007
Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many primes is easy, clever, and constructive. There are several other proofs that are more sophisticated, but open up very interesting avenues of exploration. One proof, probably due to Euler (1707 - 1783), proves that there can't be only finitely many primes by showing that the sum of their reciprocals can't be bounded. The idea of looking at infinite series to study primes leads to the use of calculus and other advanced techniques... continued »
January 2, 2007
Here is a worked out example of Euclid's method for finding new primes (see previous blog). Suppose we start with the known primes 2 and 3. We form P = 2*3 + 1 = 7. Since 7 is prime, Euclid's method expands our primes to 2, 3 and 7.
We form P = 2*3*7 + 1 = 43 which is again prime. We now do it again, with P = 2*3*7*43 + 1 = 1807. This is not prime: 1807 = 13*139. But 13 is prime, so we get 13 as our new prime, giving us the collection 2, 3, 7, 13 and 43... continued »
January 1, 2007
Last Friday's show was a repeat of a show from last year. I wrote two blogs on the math: one on Steganography (11/19/05) and the other on Hidden Partitions (4/21/06).
I would like to comment on something Larry says... continued »