Steven Strogatz’s series on math started off great and keeps getting better and better. His is the first explanation of imaginary numbers that I can fully relate to and understand. And not just on an abstract level; this is also the first time the real-world application has been apparent to me.

I think Steven Strogatz’s article on division is the best of his excellent “introduction to math” series so far. His series has quickly become one of my favorite reads on the web.

Really looking forward to watching Steven Strogatz’s math series unfold:

Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

So, let’s begin with pre-school…

He then cites a Sesame Street video. Good man.

P.S. If you want to subscribe to just Strogatz’s stuff, I couldn’t find a separate author feed at the NYT, so I created a Yahoo pipe of his posts.

How cool is it that Wired has stories up on Archimedes and Eureqa [sic]. That can’t be a coincidence, can it?

The former is a sophisticated computer model that simulates human drug trails with uncanny accuracy. In 2004 they ran it and compared it against the actual human trials for the same drug and were remarkably (but not perfectly) accurate. How? It is a…

soup-to-nuts model that captures everything known by modern medicine, from the evolution of disease in different people — as shaped by factors like race, genetic risk, and number of hours spent doing yoga — to specific physiological details, such as the amount of heart muscle that dies in the hours after a heart attack and the degree to which medications like aspirin can limit that damage.

Eureqa sounds even cooler: it is a program that takes in raw data, and proposes scientific laws to explain said data. For example, it can extrapolate the laws of motion from data representing a pendulum’s swing. It took hours for it to discover what took Newton years (not to mention everybody who came before him). Oh, and it’s a free download if there’s a scientific law you’ve been struggling to discover. Be prepared, though:

“We’ve seen this in the lab. Eureqa finds a new relationship. It’s predictive, it’s elegant, it has to be true. But we have no idea what it means.”

Jon Udell puts his Kill-a-Watt and Wolfram|Alpha to good use, to express his electricity usage in more relatable terms.

Behold the Mandelbulb, a dazzling stab at a 3D Mandelbrot (I will take the author’s word for it that this isn’t quite the real deal):

Check out some of the variations you can get by tweaking the formula. You can buy a print via deviantART.

Here’s my internal monologue upon reviewing the cool new Mathematica Image Processing features:

“Wow, that’s really cool, I can’t believe only a few lines of code can take a goose video and animate it. Very impressive. I’d like to play with that. I wonder how much it costs… Oof. $2,500. Let me see, I don’t have Mathematica, but lets calculate what percentage of my salary that is… Rats.”

Looks like I’ll stick with SpeedCrunch for now.