Wednesday 07 Oct 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so I’ll take it as read that you all know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. You’ll probably be unsurprised to hear that mathematicians use several more advanced operations than these in the course of their work. The first such operation goes by several names, but I will refer to it as “exponential”.

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Tuesday 22 Sep 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so when you went to school, they taught you how to count. You know, 1, 2, 3, 4, that kind of thing. Then a little later, they taught you how to add, and later how to subtract. Then, after a while, they taught you that if you subtract a big number from a small one, you get a special new kind of number: a negative number.

Later they teach you to multiply and divide, and you come across another new type of number: fractions. (Ah yes, every students’ favourit topic!)

Most people’s maths education stops there, but there are in fact other kinds of numbers out there that you haven’t learned about yet. Wanna see?

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Thursday 07 May 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

When I was at school, I became fascinated by fractals. By favourit fractal was the [quadratic] Mandelbrot set. Writing in BASIC, it only takes about a dozen lines of code to produce images of insane richness, complexity and detail:

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Wednesday 01 Apr 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

So last night I watched Horizon. The premise was quite simple; take one Professor of Mathematics from Oxford University, plus one idiot who knows nothing about anything. Have the boffin try to convince the idiot that mathematics is fun, cool and interesting. Much hilarity ensues.

Overall, more psychology and philosophy than actual mathematics. They touched on all kinds of interesting stuff, but not in any real depth.

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Wednesday 02 Apr 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

Now here’s an interesting idea: waveguide synthesis. For example, Native Instruments’ Reaktor product comes with an instrument known as Steam Pipe. This produces a variety of more or less realistic-sounding noises that generally resemble some kind of string or wind instrument.

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Thursday 11 Oct 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

I’ll be honest. I have no idea who Mr Chebyshev was. But his name turns up everywhere!

First of all, there are two sets of “Chebyshev polynomials”, which are apparently the solutions to a set of differential equations. In particular, the “Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind” are a family of recursively defined polynomials (defined similarly to the Fibonacci numbers) that can be used as wave-doublers.

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Thursday 06 Sep 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

Solving equations is something mathematicians seem to devote a lot of time and energy to doing. Let me set the record straight here.

From all the time and effort spent on solving equations, it might seem like solving an equation is a really difficult thing to do. It isn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

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Saturday 25 Aug 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

Most people are familiar with the idea that numbers can be negative or positive, whole or fractional. But what most people are not aware of is that this is not the end of the story. There are other, more advanced kinds of numbers too. In particular, complex numbers, the subject of this article.

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