When a guitar string is plucked, we don’t see waves travelling along the string. This is because the ends are fixed. Instead, we see a standing-wave pattern. Standing waves are also found on drum-heads and on the sound-boxes of violins. The shape of a violin strongly affects the quality and purity of the sound, as it determines the mixture of standing wave harmonics that it can sustain [TM179 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
French postage stamp, issued in 2016, to commemorate the
250th anniversary of the birth of Sophie Germain (1776-1831).
Continue reading ‘The “extraordinary talent and superior genius” of Sophie Germain’
of a real variable, we often have to find the values of 
for which the function is zero. A simple iterative method was devised by Isaac Newton and refined by Joseph Raphson. It is known either as Newton’s method or as the Newton-Raphson method. It usually produces highly accurate approximations to the roots of the equation 
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