‘mathematics’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: One of the tools that I have used since version 2 is Mathematica. I even have a Mathematica t-shirt. If you haven’t heard of it before, it is software for doing mathematics, hence the name. But this is so much more than a jumped up calculator. Among the features it sports are: Visualisation – draw graphs and plots Symbolic mathematics – algebra, integration, differentiation Functional programming Arbitrary numerical precision in calculations. It uses a notebook format to express results so the mathematics can be performed from the output of another. However you can also use it like a programming language to define functions and routines….

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Excerpt: Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular social media tool. An interesting post on Science for SEO to do with Twitter. Wouldn’t it be great to find out who was an influential member of the Twitter community? Google has an effective algorithm developed by its founders Larry Page and Sergie Brin, known as PageRank. A similar algorithm has been created for the Twitter network, by Daniel Tunkelang called, you guessed it, TunkRank. TunkRank measures your influence in the Twitter world. For those that are familiar with PageRank it uses a similar concept of traversing the directed graph the graph of  follower and…

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Excerpt: Following on from my original article on publishing equations on the web, there is a new method which may be useful to those information retreival specialists or publishers of blogs which use mathematics. Enter PHPMathpublisher a useful conversion tool that creates a png image of the equation from a simple code which has the advantage that it will display identically in most browsers. To use the script you need to have the GD library for PHP. Examples are included below: Equation Syntax All equations start with <m> and end with the tag</m> Separators for 3d-mathematics are held within {}. Subscripts: _ Superscripts ^ An extensive list is…

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Excerpt: If you’re bored with eating left-over turkey sandwiches and are fed-up watching sentimental programmes on how wonderful it is at Christmas then something which might be a bit more interesting is the  MIT video lectures which are available online. Currently, I am engrossed in the Introduction to Algorithms course which delves into the inner workings of sorting routines and searching routines and their mathematical analysis. For example, did you know that it is impossible to make a sorting algorithm using comparisions which can run better than n log n time? There are many other courses with video lectures so there is something for…

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Excerpt: It would be nice to be able to use mathematics in WordPress to write equations as easily as I can write this sentence, but I can’t. What are the options for someone writing a technical blog? LaTeX Plugin LaTeX is a popular choice in the scientific community. It uses a  code to typeset equations. The final document is a postscript or  pdf document to produce a well typeset beautiful looking documents. For the web, LaTeX equations can be converted to .gif images. WordPress also has a plugin which uses LaTeX to render the code as gif images within your post. You might think,…