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The “Napoleon of Crime” and The Laws of Thought

Published November 15, 2018 Irish Times Leave a Comment
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NewLightOnGBooleA fascinating parallel between a brilliant mathematician and an arch-villain of crime fiction is drawn in a forthcoming book – New Light on George Boole – by Des MacHale and Yvonne Cohen. Professor James Moriarty, master criminal and nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, was described by the detective as “the Napoleon of crime”. The book presents convincing evidence that Moriarty was inspired by Professor George Boole [TM151, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].

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Grandi’s Series: A Second Look

Published July 26, 2018 Occasional Leave a Comment
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Grandis-Series
In an earlier post, we discussed Grandi’s series, originally studied by the Italian monk Dom Guido Grandi around 1703. It is the series

\displaystyle G = 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + \dots

This is a divergent series: the sequence of partial sums is {\{ 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, \dots \}}, which obviously does not converge, but alternates between {0} and {1}.

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Grandi’s Series: Divergent but Summable

Published July 12, 2018 Occasional Leave a Comment
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Is the Light On or Off?

Suppose a light is switched on for a half-minute, off for a quarter minute, on for one eighth of a minute and so on until precisely one minute has elapsed. Is the light on or off at the end of this (infinite) process? Representing the two states “on” and “off” by {1} and {0}, the sequence of states over the first minute is {\{ 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, \dots \}}. But how do we ascertain the final state from this sequence? This question is sometimes known as Thomson’s Lamp Puzzle.

Grandis-Series

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Optical Refinements at the Parthenon

Published June 21, 2018 Irish Times Leave a Comment
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The Parthenon is a masterpiece of symmetry and proportion. This temple to the Goddess Athena was built with pure white marble quarried at Pentelikon, about 20km from Athens. It was erected without mortar or cement, the stones being carved to great accuracy and locked together by iron clamps. The building and sculptures were completed in just 15 years, between 447 and 432 BC. [TM141 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].

Parthenon-Photo

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Mathematics at the Science Museum

Published May 17, 2018 Irish Times Leave a Comment
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The new Winton Gallery at London’s Science Museum in South Kensington holds a permanent display on the history of mathematics over the past 400 years. The exhibition shows how mathematics has underpinned astronomy, navigation and surveying in the past, and how it continues to pervade the modern world [see TM139, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].

HardingGallery

Central Display at the Science Museum

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Fourier’s Wonderful Idea – II

Published April 5, 2018 Irish Times Leave a Comment
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Solving PDEs by a Roundabout Route

Fourier-3

Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)

Joseph Fourier, born just 250 years ago, introduced a wonderful idea that revolutionized science and mathematics: any function or signal can be broken down into simple periodic sine-waves. Radio waves, micro-waves, infra-red radiation, visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma rays are all forms of electromagnetic radiation, differing only in frequency  [TM136 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].

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Fourier’s Wonderful Idea – I

Published March 29, 2018 Occasional Leave a Comment
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Breaking Complex Objects into Simple Pieces

“In a memorable session of the French Academy on the
21st of December 1807, the mathematician and engineer
Joseph Fourier announced a thesis which inaugurated a
new chapter in the history of mathematics. The claim of
Fourier appeared to the older members of the Academy,
including the great analyst Lagrange, entirely incredible.”

Introduction

Fourier

Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)

The above words open the Discourse on Fourier Series, written by Cornelius Lanczos. What greatly surprised and shocked Lagrange and the other academicians was the claim of Fourier that an arbitrary function, defined by an arbitrarily capricious graph, can always be resolved into a sum of pure sine and cosine functions. There was good reason to question Fourier’s theorem. Since sine functions are continuous and infinitely differentiable, it was assumed that any superposition of such functions would have the same properties. How could this assumption be reconciled with Fourier’s claim?

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