Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Cinderella

Experience Geometry on your desktop and on the web. Easily create startling geometric constructions! Starting from simple triangle relations, continuing with trigonometric theorems up to fractals and transformation groups Cinderella lets you create and manipulate visualizations in an intuitive, yet powerful way.

Click here for more information.

Monday, December 01, 2008

Friday, November 14, 2008

Worldmapper

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.

Monday, November 10, 2008

How online games are solving uncomputable problems

Online games that tap your brainpower without you noticing can crack problems that have defeated the most powerful computers, says Lewis Dartnell. Get involved with distributed computing with these online games and downloads.

Click here for more information.

Monday, October 06, 2008

The Eyeballing Game

The Eyeball website gives you some mathematical figures and asks you to eyeball them correctly. I scored a 5.92 on my first try.

Just scored 3.13 on my second try.

More games at the Games for the Brain website.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Titanic Primes Raced to Win $100,000 Research Award

Researchers have discovered the two largest known prime numbers, a whopping 12,978,189 and 11,185,272 digits long, as part of a 12 year old, world-wide volunteer computing project, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search ("GIMPS"). The primes can be written shorthand as 243,112,609-1 and 237,156,667-1. The larger number qualifies for a $100,000 research award, most of which GIMPS will donate to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and to charity.

Click here for more information.

Friday, August 29, 2008

F#

I'm learning F#, Microsoft's latest functional programming language for the .NET family. Very nice and interesting. I recommend buying these books on it: F# for Scientists, Foundations of F#, and Expert F#.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

WorldWide Telescope

The WorldWide Telescope
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Processing

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

There's also a Javascript version of the code.

OpenVisuals

OpenVisual is a visualization that is created using Processing and OpenVisuals API, which makes it possible to use with any datasets on this website. Visualization artists can use these datasets to build a visualization. Once they upload the visualization to this website, it can also be used to visualize any other dataset on this website through OpenVisuals API.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Glimpses Of A New Mathematical World

A new mathematical object was revealed yesterday during a lecture at the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM). Two researchers from the University of Bristol exhibited the first example of a third degree transcendental L-function. These L-functions encode deep underlying connections between many different areas of mathematics.

Click here for more information.

Building a 5-ton mechanical calculator... from 19th-century plans

Starting in May, many will have the opportunity to see for themselves how they did computing the old-fashioned way: with lots of gears, a big crank and some muscle.

The Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif., will unveil a new construction, the first in the United States, of the 19th century British mathematician Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, an improved version of his earlier mechanical digital calculator.

Click here for more information.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Rubik’s Cube Proof Cut to 25 Moves

Last year, a couple of fellas at Northeastern University with a bit of spare time on their hands proved that any configuration of a Rubik’s cube could be solved in a maximum of 26 moves.

Now Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has gone one better. He’s shown that there are no configurations that can be solved in 26 moves, thereby lowering the limit to 25.

Full article here.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Slabacus (Slide Rule & Abacus Simulator)

The slide rule & abacus simulators teach you how to use these two tools.

Monday, February 25, 2008

The Sheet-Based Calculator (Part II)

After finding the Sheet-Based Calculator link and source code, I decided to download it and improve it for my Java learning experience and also because it's neat. :-)

Here's a link to the JAR file if you're interested.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Geometry Constructions->LaTeX Converter (GCLC)

GCLC (from "Geometry Constructions->LaTeX converter") is a tool for visualizing and teaching geometry, and for producing mathematical illustrations. Its basic purpose is converting descriptions of mathematical objects (written in the GCL language) into digital figures. GCLC provides easy-to-use support for many geometrical constructions, isometric transformations, conics, and parametric curves. The basic idea behind GCLC is that constructions are formal procedures, rather than drawings. Thus, in GCLC, producing mathematical illustrations is based on "describing figures" rather than of "drawing figures".

The Sheet-Based Calculator

The Sheet-Based Calculator allows you to enter normal mathematical expressions in a word-processor-like environment, but then to execute them as well. Its algorithm is implemented by using compiler concepts and parser grammar rules. It can be used in most operating systems because it is written in Java.

Friday, February 08, 2008

Visual Mathematics Dictionary

An interesting site with plenty of visual definitions for all school grades.

Monday, February 04, 2008

History's Greatest Gadgets

It's not all about circuits, silicon and stock options: mankind's been making technology since the dawn of time. Here is ten of the most wonderful gadgets from centuries—and millenia—past.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Running the Numbers

An interesting set of pictures by Chris Jordan that shows the sizes of various U.S. consumptions.

Friday, January 18, 2008

New Smartpen And Paper To Help Teach Blind College Students

A new smartpen and paper technology that works with touch and records classroom audio aims to bring these subjects to life for blind students.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The History of the Earth in a Toilet Paper Roll

The earth is over 5 billion years old. Life first originated in the oceans 3.4 billion years ago. The dinosaurs died out 65 million years in the past. Human recorded history stretches back 10,000 years in time.

These numbers are too large to visualize, and difficult to compare. Here's an easy way to put time in perspective, and actually visualize different eras in the earth's history. You'll need a roll of toilet paper, a long hallway, and some sticky notes.

Click here for more information.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Statistics Calculators

These statistics calculators are free to be used by anyone in the research community at large.

Notable Properties of Specific Numbers

An interesting website for certain numbers.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Art Exhibit Features RFID Math Problems

Math Art Exhibit
There's an awesome exhibit right now at the Mori Art Museum titled "Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats in Japanese Art." It introduces some of the most important classic futurist artists from Japan as well as up-and-coming ones.

Pictured here is Math Gates. Designed by two professors—one math prof from Kyoto University and one new media expert from Tokyo National University—it's an interactive installation in which visitors carry RFID cards with math problems on them. The goal is to reach a pre-determined number—kinda like in the license plate number game. The idea behind it is to gain a better understanding of a computer's logic circuits. After all, humans aren't that different from machines, and machines are made by humans.

The exhibit runs through Jan 14, 2008.

Click here for original link.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games

Interesting story on how the music group Nine Inch Nails encoded a few hidden messages in one of their tours and albums.

To play it on the Wired site, select all text in each section (two sections) up to the input boxes of that section (or do the entire page at once) and paste it into Microsoft Word. Remove all formatting that has Font Color equal to Automatic and only the colored text remains. What the sentences mean and which ones to use, with punctuation, should become obvious.