Welcome! Welcome to the 169th edition of the Carnival of Mathematics! This monthly roundup of some of the best and latest math blogs. As per tradition let’s begin with some trivia about the number 169. It’s a square! And if we reverse every number above, it still remains a square Blogs First up we…
This Thursday, April 11th, a washing machine sized-spacecraft will attempt to land on the Moon. If it succeeds, it will be the first privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, and make Israel the fourth country to land on the Moon after Russia/USSR, the USA, and China. This post will go over the basics of what…
TLDR: I’m ending weekly blog posts because I’m too busy and want to spend the time I work on weekly posts on other projects. The blog won’t be ending, but new posts will be sporadic. Why When I started Gereshes last year, I set a goal of publishing a blog post every week. Since then,…
2 Months It’s been two months since New Horizon’s new year flyby of Ultima Thule, proper name (486958) 2014 MU69. Data from the flyby is still trickling in and being poured over by planetary scientist, but the results so far show Ultima Thule to both be a good fit for data taken from the ground, as…
Introduction to the Library As I’m doing research I end up writing a lot of code. Most of the time it’s one-off scripts and functions for a specific task, but sometimes I do something enough that I add it to my permanent in-house library. I’ve decided to collect several of these functions related to astrodynamics,…
Picture This Humans are a visual species, we look for patterns in life and we are great at finding them when they are visual. We can tell two people apart just by looking at their faces. Sometime’s we’re too good at seeing patterns and we see faces in a piece of burnt toast. If we’re…
One Pendulum Less A few weeks ago we looked at how to balance an inverted pendulum as part of a 3 part series on balancing inverted pendulums. Part 2 is still being worked on, but here’s part 3, an exploration of how shaking an inverted pendulum up and down really fast can make it stable.…
Springs, Except More Fun In any introductory physics or differential equation’s class we are introduced to the simple spring mass system. Because of Hooks law it’s nice, linear, and easy to analyze. But not all springs follow Hooks Law. Some, like the duffing spring we’ll analyze in this post, are nonlinear and chaotic. What’s a…
Everything Orbits About Something In our solar system, Moons orbit around planets, which themselves orbit around the sun. Well, actual they orbit about the system barycenter, the combined center of mass between the two bodies. But can we get an object to orbit around a region without a barycenter? Yes! (Kinda) There are actually a…
