Monthly Archives: October 2012

Book review: The Irrationals

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Brent

The Irrationals: A Story of the Numbers You Can’t Count On Julian Havil Princeton University Press sends me lots of cool books to review! Here’s one. Remember the irrational numbers, which can’t be expressed as a ratio of integers ? … Continue reading →

Posted in books, number theory, review | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Visualizing Pascal’s triangle remainders

Posted on October 20, 2012 by Brent

In a comment on my previous post, Juan Valera mentioned something about visualizing multiples of prime numbers in Pascal’s Triangle: In college, there was a poster with different Pascal Triangles, each of them highlighting the multiples of different prime numbers. … Continue reading →

Posted in fractals, modular arithmetic, pascal's triangle, pattern, pictures | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

Making a computer out of… dominoes?

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Brent

When I mentioned carrying out computational processes with a room full of dominoes, I wasn’t kidding. Matt Parker is planning to build a domino computer at the Manchester Science Festival at the end of the month. The Manchester Science Festival … Continue reading →

Posted in computation, links, video | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Factorization diagrams

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Brent

In an idle moment a while ago I wrote a program to generate "factorization diagrams". Here’s 700: It’s easy to see (I hope), just by looking at the arrangement of dots, that there are in total. Here’s how I did … Continue reading →

Posted in arithmetic, pictures, primes, programming, recursion | Tagged , , | 72 Comments

What I Do: Part 0

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Brent

This is the first in a planned series of posts explaining what I do in my “day job” as a computer science PhD student. The idea is to write a series of posts of increasing specificity, but all aimed at … Continue reading →

Posted in computation, meta | Tagged , , | 6 Comments