Recent content by libervurto

I would say it is still necessary, to a much lesser extent perhaps. There are so many times I want to do a calculation but don't have my phone at hand, or it seems like too trivial a calculation to go through all the button pressing and screen swiping it takes to open a damn calculator app, or...

I have a couple of tricks for remembering the 7ths. The recurring digits of n/7 are the same for any n, the pattern starts on a different digit depending on n. (So you need only remember 1/7.) No digit in 1/7 is divisible by 3. The first three significant digits in 1/7 add up to 7. Use even...

People talk about different kinds of humour/laughter: nervous laughter, relief, absurdity, surprise, etc. but I think these all boil down to the same thing really, they are all "misapplications" of logic, basically a faulty premise that is taken to its logical conclusion, which is then proven...

This may already be widely taught and I could be stating the obvious here, but I noticed how closely related permutations and probability are, and this gives an intuitive way to think about permutations. For example, take a deck of 52 cards. How many possible permutations are there for the...

Mathematica IS Wolfram Alpha (and free), so that is definitely worth downloading. A different kind of math program but incredibly useful is Geogebra (also free).

EXPLORING THE POSSIBILITY OF PERFORMING COMPUTATIONS WITH PLAYING CARDS I was listening to an interview with John Conway yesterday and the conversation turned to his "Game of Life". Conway mentioned that Life can be configured in such a way that it can perform arbitrary computations. This got...

I don't have any understanding of P vs NP past the colloquial explanation of it, but it occurred to me that it is essential that P ≠ NP for comedy to function. For almost all comedy to work it relies on a "punchline" that is not easily predicted but, once revealed, can be easily and near...

Thanks for the kind words and welcomes. I do have hobbies other than math and science: I like to write, play and write music for the electric piano, computer programming, drawing (even though I haven't done much of the last two lately). However, these are all things I've learned by myself so I...

You forgot to mention the food must also leave behind minimal residue: Cheetos + keyboard = bad times. Wrapping anything in a tortilla seems like a great option. Any sauce is contained, you can eat it with one hand with no finger residue, and you can make them as (un-)healthy as you like.

Yes, this is going to be one of those awful feelsy threads. I am a first year Physics student. Even at this primordial stage in my scientific career I am feeling an increasing isolation with every step I take towards greater knowledge. There is already so much that I can't share with my...