I came across this "ornamental geometric inequality" in a tribute to Lothar Collatz.... read more >>
I came across this "ornamental geometric inequality" in a tribute to Lothar Collatz.... read more >>
Iterative refinement is a technique introduced by Wilkinson for reducing the roundoff error produced during the solution of simultaneous linear equations. Higher precision arithmetic is required for the calculation of the residuals.... read more >>
Steve Eddins has recently posted a series in his blog about colormaps. I want to add one more post. With release R2014b, we are retiring jet as the default colormap, after many years of faithful service. But did you ever wonder where jet originated, and how it came to be the default? And did you ever come across colormaps like pink and bone?... read more >>
An incredible book, published in several editions from 1909 to 1933, by German mathematicians Eugene Jahnke and Fritz Emde, contains definitions and formulas for mathematical functions, hand-calculated tables of function values, and meticulous hand-drawn 2- and 3-dimensional graphs. An English edition was published by Dover in 1945.... read more >>
Our plots of the first eigenfunction of the L-shaped membrane have changed several times over the last fifty years.... 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 >>