21/04: Dollar Cost Averaging
Every now and then, if you read the brochures put out by investment companies, they'll promote an idea called "Dollar Cost Averaging". Simply put, if you have $300 to invest, instead of buying one big lump of unit trusts for $300, you spread your investment over 3 months instead.
At work, I was investigating some numerical methods for solving differential equations, of the form y'=f(x,y). A very popular method is the Runge-Kutta method of order 4.
15/10: Voronoi Diagram
Here's a little animation I made, recently, of a 3d voronoi diagram.
09/09: The Barber Paradox
I tried the "barber paradox" on my seven-year-old son this morning. for those not familiar, the barber paradox concerns a village barber, and whose hair he cuts.
13/06: Normal Distribution
Here's an interesting feature of the normal distribution. I've plotted on this graph 10 points (x,y), with x and y randomly chosen from the normal (gaussian) distribution with mean 0 and variance 1.
16/05: Shopping Maths
18/03: Why is Maths Hard?
Some people love maths, and others find it tough. I was checking my son's grade 2 maths homework the other day, and it suddenly dawned on me why people find maths tough - particularly the maths you meet as you go through the end of high school and beyond.
The other day, my son was playing with a geometric toy. This consists of a bunch of flat plastic panels, some square, some triangular, and so on, than can be clicked together at the edges.
I got an email from my internet service provider just now. One item went like this....
14/04: Artist Puzzle
Here's a nice puzzle I saw in an old copy of 'New Scientist'. Specifically, the issue of 24 January, 2004.
An artist has painted a picture of some animals.
An artist has painted a picture of some animals.