Diamond Anniversary Oldies, 1965 Edition, by RIch Paschall It’s the Sixtieth Anniversary of some great pop, rock, and folk tunes, and here at the SERENDIPITY School for the Arts, we are pleased to present our symposium on 1965 hit music. You should arrive right on time, as you have a Ticket to Ride. Don’t Just … Continue reading IT’S THE SAME OLD SONG| Serendipity – Seeking Intelligent Life on Earth
Nine years ago, I wrote a July 4th blog post about matroids called A Celebration of Independence. Today, I’d like to talk about independence’s lesser-known sibling. In particular, I want to describe a characterization of matroids due to Paul Vaderlind that I feel ought to be better known. In most books and articles on matroid […]| Matt Baker's Math Blog
In celebration of Pi Day 2024, I would like to explain how the “Arithmetic-Geometric Mean” of Gauss and Legendre can be used to give a rapid method for computing the digits of . By “rapid” here, I mean that the algorithm exhibits quadratic convergence: the number of correct digits roughly doubles with each iteration. I […]| Matt Baker's Math Blog
In honor of Pi Day 2023, I’d like to discuss Hilbert’s 7th Problem, which in an oversimplified (and rather vague) form asks: under what circumstances can a transcendental function take algebraic values at algebraic points? The connection with is that Lindemann proved in 1882 that the transcendental function takes transcendental values at every nonzero algebraic […]| Matt Baker's Math Blog
Let’s call a function $latex f : {\mathbb Z} \to {\mathbb Z}$ a near-endomorphism of $latex \mathbb Z$ if there is a constant $latex C>0$ such that $latex |f(a+b)-f(a)-f(b)| \leq C$ for al…| Matt Baker's Math Blog