An extraordinarily creative Danish mathematician, inventor, and poet who often wrote under the Old Norse pseudonym "Kumbel" meaning "tombstone." A direct descendant of the Dutch naval hero of the 16th century who had the same name, Piet Hein was born in Copenhagen and studied at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Copenhagen (later the Niels Bohr Institute) and the Technical University of Denmark. ... 続きを読む >>

Here is a classic puzzle. A pair of ladders leaning against the sides of an alley form a lopsided cross. Each ladder is propped against the base of one wall and leans against the opposite wall. If one ladder is 30 feet long, the other 20 feet long, and the point where they cross 10 feet above the ground, how wide is the alley?... 続きを読む >>

The cubic polynomial $x^3 - 2x - 5$ has a unique place in the history of numerical methods.... 続きを読む >>

This is the story of how John Todd saved what was to become one of the world's most important research institutions from destruction at the end of World War II.... 続きを読む >>

SC15, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, was held in Austin, Texas, last week, November 15 through 20. This is the largest trade show and conference that MathWorks participates in each year.... 続きを読む >>

MATLAB adds capability to search for an interval with a sign change.... 続きを読む >>

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.... 続きを読む >>

Chuck Lawson passed away in July at the age of 83. Chuck was one of the people who introduced me to computing and mathematical software. I worked for him at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the summers of 1961 and 1962, just before and after my first year in grad school.... 続きを読む >>