What does 12√2 have to do with music? What are equal temperament and just intonation? How can the MATLAB function rats help tune a piano? (This post is based in part on the Music chapter in my online book, Experiments in MATLAB.)… read more >>
A model of the human gait, developed by Nikolaus Troje, is a five-term Fourier series with vector-valued coefficients that are the principal components for data obtained in motion capture experiments involving subjects walking on a treadmill.... read more >>
When a deck of playing cards is shuffled perfectly, the result is not random. A perfect shuffle places the cards in a mathematically precise order. As a result, when the most common version of a perfect shuffle is repeated eight times, the deck returns to its original state.... read more >>
Th. J. Dekker's zeroin algorithm from 1969 is one of my favorite algorithms. An elegant technique combining bisection and the secant method for finding a zero of a function of a real variable, it has become fzero in MATLAB today. This is the first of a three part series.... read more >>
A rectangular box, such as a book or a cell phone, thrown in the air can tumble stably about its longest axis, or about its shortest axis, but not about its middle axis.... read more >>
Fritz Bauer, eminent German computer scientist and last surviving member of the organizing committee of the 1964 Gatlingburg Conference on Numerical Algebra, passed away on March 26 at the age of 90.... read more >>
The Partial Differential Equation Toolbox contains tools for the analysis of PDEs in two space dimensions and time. It is perhaps not surprising that one of the primary examples involves the L-shaped membrane.... read more >>
After reviewing the state of affairs fifty years ago, I use classic finite difference methods, followed by extrapolation, to find the first eigenvalue of the region underlying the MathWorks logo.... read more >>
