How far apart can you expect two points chosen at random in the unit square to be? I found this problem on the YouTube channel maintained by Presh Talwalkar, Mind Your Decisions. He correctly calls it a very hard puzzle. At first, I guessed the answer might be $1/2$. But the correct answer is more interesting than that.... read more >>

A quick post to point my readers to Ned Gulley's post in MATLAB Community, A Galloping Logo Zoetrope. Don't know what a Zoetrope is? Ned explains.... read more >>

Do not get involved in a bar bet with Brad Efron and his dice until you have read this.... read more >>

I have been writing books, programs, newsletter columns and blogs since 1990. I have now collected all of this material into one repository. Cleve's Corner Collection consists of 458 "documents", all available on the internet. There are... read more >>

How can you measure the distance between two words? How can you find the closest match to a word in a list of words? The Levenshtein distance between two strings is the number of single character deletions, insertions, or substitutions required to transform one string into the other. This is also known as the edit distance.... read more >>

The floating point arithmetic format that requires only 16 bits of storage is becoming increasingly popular. Also known as half precision or binary16, the format is useful when memory is a scarce resource.... read more >>

A MATLAB object for arithmetic with Roman numerals provides an example of object oriented programming. I had originally intended this as my April Fools post, but I got fascinated and decided to make it the subject of a legitimate article.... read more >>

A report about a possible bug in format bank and a visit to a local hardware store made me realize that doing decimal arithmetic with binary floating point numbers is like tightening a European bolt with an American socket wrench.... read more >>

I've long known that my Erdös Number is 3. This means that the length of the path on the graph of academic coauthorship between me and mathematician Paul Erdös is 3. Somewhat to my surprise, I recently discovered that I can also trace a chain of coauthorship to Donald J. Trump. My Trump number is 5.... read more >>

A binary tree is an elegant way to represent and process Morse code. The new MATLAB graph object provides an elegant way to manipulate binary trees. A new app, morse_tree, based on this approach, is now available in version 2.40 of Cleve's Laboratory.... read more >>