Monthly Archives: April 2006
Setting the river straight
A post here a few weeks ago discussed the late Luna B. Leopold and his work on the shapes of rivers. I mentioned in that item that Leopold collected data on a small stream called Watts Branch, near Washington, DC. … Continue reading
Posted in science
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Talkin’ Towson
I’ll be giving a talk at Towson University later this week. Details here. If you’re in the Baltimore area, please come by.
Posted in mathematics
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PageRank for physicists
Scientists are selfless seekers after truth, unswayed by worldly emoluments, immune to the tawdry enticements of fame, indifferent to prizes and honors. Thus I can’t quite imagine why anyone would bother ranking a collection of scientific papers by applying the … Continue reading
Posted in modern life, physics, science
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Brackets
A thought for the day: Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in … Continue reading
Posted in modern life, quote
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Summing up
The new issue of American Scientist is up on the Web, and the print edition will soon be delighting readers everywhere. My Computing Science column in this issue of the magazine revisits a famous bit of mathematical folklore—the story about … Continue reading
Posted in computing, mathematics
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Reversing history
Several posts here (1, 2, 3, 4) as well as my March–April column in American Scientist have looked at technologies for building reversible computing machines. Most of the discussion focuses on “combinational” logic—networks of devices that have no feedback loops … Continue reading
Posted in computing
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