Today is Friday, the 13th. In many parts of the world, today is regarded as unlucky. But I want to revisit an old question: is today unlikely? What are the chances that the 13th of any month falls on a Friday? Computing the answer makes use of a new MATLAB® feature, the datetime method.... read more >>

Let me tell you about a beautiful, fractal curve, the Dragon Curve. Download my new dragon program from the File Exchange and follow along.... read more >>

Today is Easter Sunday. Why? How is the date of Easter determined?... read more >>

Pi DayHappy Pi Day, 3/14.Here are 10,000 digits of π. Notice the six consecutive 9's in the sixth row, digits 763 through 768. n = 100; % Get pi from Symbolic Toolbox. p =... read more >>

The Wikipedia article on Pascal's Triangle has hundreds of properties of the triangle and there are dozens of other Web pages devoted to it. Here are a few facts that I find most interesting. ... read more >>

ContentsThanks ezplot('(x^2+y^2-1)^3 = x^2*y^3', ... [-1.5,1.5,-1.2,1.5]) colormap([.5 .2 .2]) ThanksEdward Scheinerman, The Mathematics Lover's Companion, Yale University Press,... read more >>

This post is about the words "Matlab" and "matlab", in upper and lower case, and without a trademark symbol. Matlab with a capital "M" is a district in Bangladesh. "matlab" with a lower case "m" is a common word in the Hindi language. ... read more >>

The first computer that I seriously used was the Burroughs 205 Datatron. I actually used two different machines, one at Caltech for two years in 1959-61 and one at the University of Utah in the summer of 1960. Both the technology and the style of usage were wildly different from today's computers.... read more >>

Two days ago I wrote about random points in a square. At the last minute I added the paragraph asking about the generalization to random points in a cube. I have to admit that I didn't check the Web to see what was known about the question.... read more >>

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 >>