Appreciation

Math, Music, and Crossword Puzzles

This is a nice profile on Dan Feyer, the winner of the 2010 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/science/07profile.html

Feyer, who is a music director in New York City, excelled at math as well as music in school. This combination of talents, math and music, is not uncommon, and both of these skills sets seem to appear with great frequency among crossword puzzle enthusiasts.

Indeed, as the article points out, Jon Delfin, a 7-time winner of the tournament, is also a musician, and many other winners and crossword constructors are math and computer science types. As one puzzler points out, the connection between math, music, and crossword puzzles is pattern finding. In addition, the three fields also rely on the manipulation of symbols that often contain no inherent meaning themselves.

This all makes perfect sense to me. I am an avid crossword puzzle solver, I have competed in the tournament many times, and I have even constructed several puzzles of my own, including this one that incorporates many mathematical ideas:

https://mrhonner.com/2011/06/02/crossword-puzzle-a-touch-of-math-2/

Unfortunately, constructing a good crossword puzzle takes as much time and effort as constructing a good math test!

By patrick honner, 13 years6 years ago

Appreciation

Menu Deconstruction: Spirit Airlines

I love scrutinizing menus. It appeals to me both as a math person and as someone with a long history of food-service employment.

Typically, my favorite menu deconstruction activity is finding inconsistent pricing among the menu items: for example, there are numerous different prices for the value meal upgrade on this Wendy’s menu. On the other hand, this Five Guys’ menu is remarkable for its pricing consistency.

So on a recent Spirit Airlines flight, I grabbed the on-board menu and took a look. Apart from the price-gouging that has become commonplace nowadays (including a $3 charge for water), the menu was relatively uninteresting until I got to the Value Meals.

Conveniently, this Spirit menu shows you exactly how much you save with each Value Meal purchase. While verifying that the numbers were accurate, I noticed something peculiar: three of the four Best Deal Values Meals were entirely comprised of alcohol!

I personally don’t consider 3 beers to be a meal, but maybe this is all part of Spirit’s unconventional business model.

Appreciation Technology

Digi-Comp II: A Mechanical Computer

The folks at EvilMadScientist.com bring you a giant working replica of the Digi-Comp II, a 60s-era build-it-yourself computer kit:

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/dciivid

After the switches are initialized to choose the operation, the machine channels a stream of pool balls through various binary gates to effect addition, multiplication, and other basic mathematical and computational procedures. For more information, check out www.digi-compii.com.

As a pure math person, I never fully appreciated these mechanical computers. But after seeing things like the Digi-Comp, cam-based mathematics, and various mechanical calculators, I’m developing a genuine respect for them

By patrick honner, 13 years6 years ago

Appreciation Challenge Technology

Pendulum Wave Animation

Inspired by a video showing the seemingly chaotic movements of pendula of varying lengths, I created this animation in Geogebra.

Using sine functions of varying periods, I was able to create a set of points that oscillate in a manner similar to the pendula in the “Pendulum Waves” video.

Consider the point on the bottom as the timekeeper. In the the time it takes the bottom point to complete one full trip (from center to right to left back to center), the next point up completes two full trips; the point above that three full trips, and so on.

Since every point is completing a whole number of trips in that amount of time, they will all sync up every time the bottom point is ready to start again. And watch the “even” points to see when they sync up, too!

By patrick honner, 13 years6 years ago