Natural Blogarithms

Last week, I received an email from a reader regarding the online mathematics program at the University of Illinois in Springfield.  I wasn’t familiar with the program and have started taking a closer look.  One of the questions that was asked by that reader was what sort of things should he be looking for [...]

(Presented by Dr. Wallace Davis at the Centennial Heritage Chapel at Wayland Baptist University, with possibly original elements and some from anonymous sources)
While some Universities may boast of their age, of their ivied walls,Of their great endowments, their marble halls,Of their vast curricular scope and reach,And of all the wonderful things they teach
Tell me, tell [...]

I know some of you who read this blog also read 360 but the sequence posted there today was too good to not pass along:
Puzzle:  Identify the next term in the sequence
1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211, 13112221, . . .

[HINT: Read the digits aloud.  The sequence is aural/visual and not numeric.]
I’ll post the answer [...]

Just finished a book I got myself for Christmas.  Actually, it was from Lori but she had me pick it out.
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.

I really enjoyed reading it and would recommend it, heartily. 
I’m reading a biography of Alan Turing next.
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.

So far since the beginning of the week , I have received no less than four messages claiming to have attachments that did not.  Within seconds of receiving them, a follow-up email arrives confessing the stupidity, idiocy, or moron-itude of the sender plus the previously promised attachment.  I point no fingers as I am [...]

I love a good math limerick.  And, no, “Nantucket” is never a destination for some mathematician in a good math limerick.  Here’s a new one I discovered online:

For the laymen,
The integral sec y dy                         -> (read as “seek y dee y”)From zero to one-sixth of piIs the log to base eOf the square-root of threeTimes [...]

There have been a number of interesting projects I’ve been asked to work on over the course of the last few weeks.  They all involve writing a little code and so I want to document some of those projects here.  They are not math related but my interests are broader than just numerical analysis [...]

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics to the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve”.
from The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner (1960)

An article by the author Mario Livio, who recently wrote the book Is [...]

Just a short post here to let you know that I am discontinuing the “Twitter Updates of the Week”.  For the last few weeks, I have had a plug-in for this blog post all of my Twitter posts, aka “tweets”, for the previous week.  Since I have Twitter piped into my facebook status, most of [...]

I’m embarrassed by the fact that I have 3 weeks of Twitter updates cluttering the first page of this blog.  That means, that I’ve gone without blogging for at least two weeks.  I was trying to get on a roll with the number puzzles.  I have a backlog of some interesting links and topics in [...]