I am addicted. I keep coming back to John Conway's Game of Life. Years ago, I wrote a chapter about Life in Experiments with MATLAB. I wrote a three-part series about Life shortly after I started blogging. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. I have recently made significant enhancements to my MATLAB program for Life. I never seem to finish the code because I get diverted by actually using the program to explore the Universe. I invite you to join me. But, fair warning, you might become addicted too.... read more >>

Two months ago I wrote a blog post about Teaching Calculus to a Deep Learner. We wrote the code for that post in one afternoon in the MathWorks booth at the SIAM Annual Meeting. Earlier that day, during his invited talk, MIT Professor Gil Strang had spontaneously wondered if it would possible to teach calculus to a deep learning computer program. None of us in the booth were experts in deep learning.... read more >>

This week’s post is by Reece Teramoto.
MathWorks recently took over sponsorship of the Math Modeling Challenge, a contest for high school juniors and seniors in the U.S organized by SIAM – Society... read more >>

Find the optimum traveling salesman tour through the capitals of the 48 contiguous states in the USA.... read more >>

Create a MATLAB® graph object from information about neighbors among the 48 contiguous states in the USA.... read more >>

I probably first saw this matrix in 1960 in John Todd's class at Caltech. But I forgot about it until Tahar Loulou jogged my memory with a comment following my blog post in late May. It deserves a place in our gallery of interesting matrices.... read more >>

MIT's Professor Gil Strang gave two talks in one morning recently at the SIAM annual meeting. Both talks derived from his experience teaching a new course at MIT on linear algebra and neural nets. His first talk, "The Structure of a Deep Neural Net", was in a minisymposium titled "Deep Learning and Deep Teaching", which he organized. Another talk in that minisymposium was by Drexel's Professor Pavel Grinfeld on "An Informal Approach to Teaching Calculus." An hour later, Gil's gave his second talk, "Teaching About Learning." It was an invited talk at the SIAM Conference on Applied Mathematics Education.... read more >>

Antarctic Ships, Fractal and RealDavid Wilson, from the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, has alerted me to this remarkable coincidence. Here is the "Burning Ship" from my post... read more >>

Here are the first 12 integers from an infinite sequence defined by a deceptively simple rule. Can you see the pattern? Try to predict the next number in the sequence.... read more >>

If you follow this blog regularly, you know that I love fractals. I recently spent a pleasant afternoon in Nashua, New Hampshire, where my daughter Teresa introduced me to Gregory Searle, a fractal artist and computer geek. Here is his logo.... read more >>