Monthly Archives: December 2011
The acceleration of history
Four hundred years ago, the idea that the Earth goes around the Sun rather than vice versa was not just a scientific breakthrough but also a cultural bombshell. People were asked to reimagine the world they were living in. Not … Continue reading
Posted in science
10 Comments
Chebfun
I went to a magic show the other day. Nick Trefethen was giving a demo of Chebfun, a Matlab extension package he is building in collaboration with his Oxford students and colleagues. In the course of the talk, several mathematical … Continue reading
Posted in computing, mathematics
7 Comments
How Did the Stars Get Their Points?
Those are hot young stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud—one of the puppy-dog galaxies that follow the Milky Way around—photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. (Detail cropped from a Wikipedia image.) Note that four rays seem to emanate from each … Continue reading
Posted in linguistics
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TNT Is Not TeX
The curious document above was produced sometime in the spring of 1980 by Don Knuth to show off the typographical prowess of his new programs, TeX and Metafont. The software was then being introduced to the mathematical community through the … Continue reading
Posted in computing, mathematics
19 Comments