Follow on twitter: @thatsmaths
As you pass through an airport, you are photographed several times by security systems. Face recognition systems can identify you by comparing your digital image to faces stored in a database. This form of identification is gaining popularity, allowing you to access online banking without a PIN or password. [see TM146, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, answering a question. Face detection indicated by squares.
Stanislaw Ulam, born in Poland in 1909, was a key member of the remarkable Lvov School of Mathematics, which flourished in that city between the two world wars. Ulam studied mathematics at the Lvov Polytechnic Institute, getting his PhD in 1933. His original research was in abstract mathematics, but he later became interested in a wide range of applications. He once joked that he was “a pure mathematician who had sunk so low that his latest paper actually contained numbers with decimal points” [TM138 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Operation Castle, Bikini Atoll, 1954
Continue reading ‘Stan Ulam, a mathematician who figured how to initiate fusion’
The atmospheric temperature at a fixed spot may change in two ways. First, heat sources or sinks may increase or decrease the thermal energy; for example, sunshine may warm the air or radiation at night may cool it. Second, warmer or cooler air may be transported to the spot by the air flow in a process called advection. Normally, the two mechanisms act together, sometimes negating and sometimes reinforcing each other. What is true for temperature is also true for other quantities: pressure, density, humidity and even the flow velocity itself. This last effect may be described by saying that “the wind blows the wind” [TM132 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Hurricane Ophelia approaching Ireland, 16 October 2017, 1200Z. Image from https://earth.nullschool.net/
A A Markov (1856-1922)
Imagine examining the first 20,000 letters of a book, counting frequencies and studying patterns. This is precisely what Andrey Markov did when he analyzed the text of Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. This work comprises almost 400 stanzas of iambic tetrameter and is a classic of Russian literature. Markov studied the way vowels and consonants alternate and deduced the probabilities of a vowel being followed by a another vowel, by a consonant, and so on. He was applying a statistical model that he had developed in 1906 and that we now call a Markov Process or Markov chain. [TM123 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Continue reading ‘Andrey Markov’s Brilliant Ideas are still a Driving Force’
Common-or-Garden Ellipses
In an earlier post we saw how a gardener may set out oval flower-beds using a well-known property of ellipses: the sum of the distances from any point on the ellipse to the two foci is always the same value, 
Gardener’s method of drawing an ellipse [Image Wikimedia].
Motivation
Ireland has four provinces, the principal city in each being the provincial capital: Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Galway. The map here shows the location of these cities. Now imagine a company that needs to visit and to deliver goods frequently to all four cities. Where might they locate their HQ to minimize transport costs and travel times?
One possibility is to find the location with the smallest distance sum:
where 
Continue reading ‘Locating the HQ with Multi-focal Ellipses’
Tomorrow we celebrate Bloomsday, the day of action in Ulysses. Most of us regard Joyce’s singular book as a masterpiece, even if we have not read it. In contrast, Finnegans Wake is considered by some as a work of exceptional genius, by others as impenetrable bafflegab [See TM117 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Wavelet transform of sentence length sequence in Ulysses. Note the structural change around sentence number 13,000. Image from Drozdz, et al (2016).
