The Lotka-Volterra equations are a pair of differential equations used to model population dynamics. They assume an idealized environment with two species—one predator and one prey—and describe how the two populations change over time. The equations were developed simultaneously by
I think everyone knows what an ellipse is. It’s an elongated, squished circle that looks kind of like an egg. In mathematical terms, it’s considered a conic section. That means you can slice through a cone and trace an ellipse,
First things first: Yes, that’s a Linkin Park lyric. I’m not proud of it but there aren’t enough pop-culture pendulum references. I think most people understand what a pendulum is. It’s when you have a heavy thing that swings on
Usually on the blog we apply a function to each element of a one-dimensional array, like [1, 2, 3], and get back another array, like [10, 20, 30]. Then we use both lists to plot a series of (x, y)
Netflix premiered a new sci-fi show this year, 3 Body Problem, which brought attention to a whole host of nerdy Wikipedia articles. [No spoilers!] One of those topics was the three-body problem. The TL;DR version is that if you have
If you’ve watched a single uninterrupted TV commercial break in the past couple years you’ve probably noticed the deluge of sports betting ads. The industry is growing incredibly quickly. It has brought in well over $300 billion in wagers since
You’ve probably heard that March 14 is unofficially (or maybe officially in some circles) recognized as Pi Day. That’s because the digits 3-1-4 match the first three digits in the number pi (π = 3.14159265…). I’ve always said there’s no
“What’s a palindrome again? Wait, I think that’s an anagram. I can’t even spell onomatopoeia.” A palindrome is a word or phrase (or anything, really) that’s written the same forward and backward. For example: Racecar Madam Evil olive Step on
Every Friday morning FiveThirtyEight posts a math challenge in their Riddler column. The May 21, 2021 problem featured “anti-isosceles” sets. I’ll let the Riddler himself explain in more detail: But this week, Jordan is asking about what he calls
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man. —Henry Adams Recently I watched a Youtube video from Numberphile that piqued my interest. If you aren’t familiar with the channel, they produce a lot of short math