Tag Archives: random

More on Human Randomness

Posted on November 9, 2019 by Brent

In a post a few months ago I asked whether there is a way for a human to reliably generate truly random numbers. I got a lot of great responses and I think it’s worth summarizing them here! Randomness in … Continue reading →

Posted in computation, people | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Human Randomness

Posted on September 23, 2019 by Brent

Randomness is hard for humans It is notoriously difficult for humans to come up with truly random numbers. I don’t really have any data I can point to in particular, but there are quite a few well-known phenomena that show … Continue reading →

Posted in computation, people | Tagged , , , | 27 Comments

Mystery curve, animated

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Brent

As a follow-on to my previous post, here’s an animation (17MB) showing how the “mystery curve” arises as a sum of circular motions: Recall that the equation for the curve is . The big blue circle corresponds to the term—it … Continue reading →

Posted in complex numbers, geometry, programming | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Random cyclic curves

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Brent

Princeton Press just sent me a review copy of a new book by Frank Farris called Creating Symmetry: The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns. It looks amazing and I’m super excited to read it. Apparently John Cook has been reading … Continue reading →

Posted in complex numbers, geometry, programming | Tagged , , , , , | 24 Comments

Making connections

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Brent

Here’s something fun I was playing around with today. I generated 100 random points and connected some of them with lines. Can you figure out how I chose which lines to draw? How about these? (Same points, different lines.) Or … Continue reading →

Posted in challenges, geometry | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments