Koch Snowflake
The Koch Snowflake is a fractal, and, as you can see, two sizes of Koch Snowflakes in a 1:3 ratio of areas tile the plane. (Kudos to Eric Weisstein’s Mathworld for bringing the latter fact to my attention.)
For those of you now wondering, “what are fractals, anyway?” or “what does it even mean for a [...]
News from the Langmuir Group
Our first publication on the dynamics of Langmuir domains made it to print in the January issue of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and we submitted a second paper to Physical Reviews E. Also, I made a very pretty movie which shows off the striking agreement between observation and the simulation’s predictions.
Last but not least, [...]
Mood Music
One of the first things I plan to do once I become fabulously rich is to hire a personal orchestra to follow me around and play appropriate background music. For example, I am, right now, handily knocking out nasty technical math problems. And while math is certainly its own reward, think how much better it [...]
Hedge Your Happiness
The Economist suggests that you hedge your happiness. It’s simultaneously hilarious, and a good idea. Anyone want to gamble money that I still won’t have any job offers in a month?
Aliasing in Seattle
The rain falls hard. Watch it hit the asphalt. Relax your eyes and see the illusion of motion: like hundreds of ants flitting to and fro.
I wonder just where this aliasing enters into the brain’s visual processing.
Navier-Stokes Update
[Update to the news item which I posted earlier.]
Alas, the possible Immortal Smooth Solution of the Three Space Dimensional Navier-Stokes System has been “withdrawn by the author due a serious flaw”. For the time-being, we will all continue to toss in our sleep, worrying whether the Navier-Stokes equations are well-posed. Although her million-dollar proof appears [...]
Existence of Smooth Solutions to Navier-Stokes
Update (10.10.06): The paper has been “withdrawn by the author due a serious flaw”.
The big math news is that Penny Smith of Lehigh University appears to have proved the existence of smooth solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. This is one of the ten Millenium Problems for which the Clay Mathematics Institute is offering a [...]
OpenPGP key
To go along with the new name, I made a new OpenPGP cryptographic key. Download it and then phone me to verify the key fingerprint.
For those of you who aren’t so familiar with cryptography, it is just a set of mathematical tools which enable people to exchange messages (e.g. email) over unsecured channels [...]
