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 >>

The Lake Arrowhead Coauthor Graph came out of the Householder XII conference in 1993 at the UCLA conference center in the mountains north of San Bernardino. John Gilbert now remembers it as one of the first computational social network analyses he had ever seen. Today I revisit it using the new MATLAB graph object.... read more >>

The adjacency matrix of a hypercube demonstrates the new MATLAB graph object.... read more >>

MIT's Professor Daniel Frey recently introduced me to an ancient mechanical puzzle known as "Chinese Rings", "Patience", or "Baguenaudier." I have modified Daniel's simulator to produce a new app. The state space of the puzzle forms a hypercube.... read more >>

"ULP" stands for "unit in the last place." An ulps plot samples a fundamental math function such as $\sin{x}$, or a more esoteric function like a Bessel function. The samples are compared with more accurate values obtained from a higher precision computation. A plot of the accuracy, measured in ulps, reveals valuable information about the underlying algorithms.... read more >>

A headline in the New York Times at the end of 2016 said "Growth of U.S. Population Is at Slowest Pace Since 1937". This prompted me to revisit an old chestnut about fitting and extrapolating census data. In the process I have added a couple of nonlinear fits, namely the logistic curve and the double exponential Gompertz model.... read more >>

I don't recall where I found this seasonal fractal. And I can't explain how it works. So please submit a comment if you can shed any light on either of these questions.... read more >>

When I was in high school in the 1950's, I didn't know anything about matrices. But I nearly encountered one when I wrote a paper for my physics class about the color scheme that allowed new color TV broadcasts to be compatible with existing black-and-white TV receivers.... read more >>

(Please replace the erroneous posting from yesterday, Nov. 28, with this corrected version.)... read more >>