The Swinging Sticks is a kinetic sculpture that exhibits chaotic motion. The device became very popular after it upstaged Tony Stark in Iron Man 2. My daughter Carolyn gave me a desktop version of Swinging Sticks for Christmas. I immediately set out to simulate it.... read more >>
I have made a half dozen blog posts about Rubik's Cube so far this year. And, during the MATLAB Central Mini Hack in October, I resurrected an old code about the Color Cube. Now, a combination of the two, Rubik/Color Qube, creates an elegant tool for investigating Matrices in Action.... read more >>
A 231-character static version of colorcubes in the current MiniHack generated quite a bit of interest. So I am posting the full version, where you can change number of cubes and the view point, at this link.... read more >>
The Soma Cube brings back memories.... read more >>
The matrices in the following animations are at the heart of computer graphics. They describe objects moving in three-dimensional space and are essential to MATLAB's Handle Graphics, to Computer Added Design packages, to Computer Graphics Imagery in films, and to most popular video games. Many modern computers contain GPUs, Graphic Processing Units, which are optimized to compute the product of these matrices.... read more >>
This blog post describes Qube, my Rubik's Cube simulator. Source code for Qube is now available in one single file from this link: Qube_osf.m. I will also submit the code to the MATLAB Central File Exchange. As usual, I welcome any feedback.... read more >>
Rubik's Cube is one of the great mathematical puzzles of all time. Most people are just interested in solving Rubik's Cube rapidly, but deeper investigation reveals a rich mathematical and computational structure. A digital Rubik's Cube simulator provides a laboratory for the study of linear algebra, group theory, data structures and computer graphics.... read more >>
My recent obsession with cubes in this blog has led me back to Rubik's cube, perhaps the greatest mathematical puzzle of all time.... read more >>