Monthly Archives: October 2012

Quotation for the week: Lovelace

Posted on October 29, 2012 by strathmaths

Ada Day may have been and gone this year already, but there’s no harm repeating a famous passage from Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace’s Notes to General Menabrea’s Sketch of the Analytical Engine: We may say most aptly, that the Analytical … Continue reading →

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Modelling the man who fell to earth

Posted on October 26, 2012 by strathmaths

On the Wolfram blog, there’s a nice article analysing Felix Baumgartner’s recent supersonic skydiving feat in terms of (reasonably) elementary Newtonian mechanics. They show how to calculate his trajectory by integrating the governing equation in Mathematica: for those of you … Continue reading →

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Quotation for the week: Hooke

Posted on October 22, 2012 by strathmaths

A fairly self-explanatory quotation this week, from the first chapter of Robert Hooke’s splendidly titled book How to Tell the Liars from the Statisticians (CRC Press, 1983): It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This … Continue reading →

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Puzzle: Joyner’s five statements

Posted on October 17, 2012 by strathmaths

The following little logical teaser appears as “Ponderable 1.1.3” in David Joyner’s book Adventures in Group Theory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008; also available to download for free). Determine which of the following statements is true. Exactly one of these … Continue reading →

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Quotation for the week: Edison

Posted on October 15, 2012 by strathmaths

The American businessman and inventor Thomas Edison is credited with an awful lot of quotations extolling the virtues of hard work, persistence and other desirable qualities for the budding entrepreneur. (Edison has attracted criticism from some people who felt that … Continue reading →

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Some golden rules for new mathematicians

Posted on October 10, 2012 by strathmaths

We start this semester’s posts with a contribution from one of our fourth-year students. The beginning of a new academic year always holds promises of “I will try harder this year”; none more so than those, like myself, heading into … Continue reading →

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