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Moar Math!
But my brain is full! You may have noticed that, in a number of recent posts, the topic has been math. The good-bad news is that there’s more to come (sorry, but I love this stuff). The good-good news...
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Sideband #62: Quaternions
Folded into the mixed baklava of my 2018, was a special mathematical bit of honey. With the help of some excellent YouTube videos, the light bulb finally went on for me, and I could see quaternions....
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Magnitudes vs Numbers
One of my earliest posts was Analog vs Digital. A few years later, I wrote about it in more detail (twice). Since then I’ve touched on it here and there. In all cases, I wrote from the perspective that...
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Rational vs Real
One of the great philosophical conundrums involves the origin of numbers and mathematics. I first learned of it as Platonic vs Aristotelian views, but these days it’s generally called Platonism vs...
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Number Islands
In the Rational vs Real post I mentioned that real numbers were each “an infinitely tiny island separated from direct contact with all other numbers.” The metaphor of each real number as an island...
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“Imaginary” Numbers
Yes, this is a math post, but don’t run off too quickly. I’ll keep it as simple as possible (but no simpler), and I’ll do all the actual math so you can just ride along and watch. What I’m about here...
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“Imaginary” Parabola
Graph of ax2 for diff a values.(green < 1; blue = 1; red > 1) This is a little detour before the main event. The first post of this series, which explained why the imaginary unit, i, is important...
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The Complex Plane
In the first post I explained why the mathematical “imaginary” number i is “real” (in more than one sense of the word). That weird number is just a stepping stone to the complex numbers, which are...
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Parker: Humble Pi
I just finished Humble Pi (2019), by Matt Parker, and I absolutely loved it. Parker, a former high school maths teacher, now a maths popularizer, has an easy breezy style dotted with wry jokes and good...
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Math Books
There are many science-minded authors and working physicists who write popular science books. While there aren’t as many math-minded authors or working mathematicians writing popular math books, it’s...
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BB #87: Two = Zero!
You may have, at some point, seen one of those bits where a series of seemingly simple math operations somehow end up proving that 1=0 or something equally clearly wrong. Most of them accomplish their...
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