Category Archives: Mathematics
Complex Reflection Groups
After a spring clean I came across a talk I gave on the classification of complex reflection groups back in March 2011.
Distribution of Pancake Day
Today is pancake day and it got me thinking about the fact that I remember the day falling on my birthday (March 7th) just once in my lifetime. How long will I have to wait until it next falls on … Continue reading
Relationship between Car Insurance Price and Population Density
There was some discussion in my office today about the correlation between car insurance prices and where you live. The idea being that the prices are correlated with population density.
New Pound Coin
Anyone who knows me / has been lucky (!) enough to have been on a maths or physics course taught by me will know how I like to moan about the mathematics of the new pound coin…
Number of days until first Premier League manager sacking
I’ll get straight to the point, on average the first Premier League manager is sacked after 77 days.
Easy way to remember sin, cos and tan values
One of my tutees showed me an easy way to remember sin and cos values for the “common” angles, and once you’ve got those you’ve also got tan, cosec, sec and cot.
Correlation between Astronaut name and Apollo mission
Perhaps we’ve finally worked out Deke Slayton’s method for choosing the Apollo crews, basing it on alphabetical order…
Math(s) can be confusing…
I meet a man walking down the street, who I know has two children. He introduces me to his son, what is the probability that his other child is a girl?
Standard Deviation in IDL
The built in IDL standard deviation function in IDL, STDDEV, uses the moment function which treats the standard deviation as a sample, rather than a population. A short programme can give us both options.
Standard Deviation of Noise in TV Viewing Figures
As discussed in my last post we found that ‘the standard deviation of the noise in viewers is about 20% of the range of viewers’ for Grey’s Anatomy. I wanted to see if a similar figure was true for other … Continue reading