Lost Art in the Mathematical Sciences
I have moved my Dead Reckonings blog from its original home to this site to improve performance and bring a new look to the blog. I hope you like the new style. I tried out some newer typefaces but reverted Continue reading
I am happy to announce Sliver, a free software application I wrote over the last two years for multivariate data visualization. Sliver includes parallel coordinate (PC) plots, PC plot matrices, various types of configurable 2D and 3D scatterplots, and plots Continue reading
The final completion of my 2013 calendar, Graphical Astronomy, has been delayed, so at this point I am going to update the dates for 2014 and post it this fall. As partial compensation, I’ve created a Valentine s Day card for Continue reading
Last month Joe Marasco, Leif Roschier and I published an article on Bayes Theorem in The UMAP Journal that included a foldout of large circular nomograms for calculating the results from it. The article, Doc, What Are My Chances?, can Continue reading
I want to announce that my fellow collaborators in nomography, Joe Marasco and Leif Roschier, and I have a new website called Modern Nomograms to offer posters of new nomograms that we hope will interest people. Our initial posters are Continue reading
by Ron Doerfler and Miles Forster Part I of this essay provided background information that demonstrates the difficulty of the problem of mental extraction of 13th roots and the efforts of calculators to master it. But can it be possible Continue reading
by Ron Doerfler and Miles Forster Mental calculators of note (so-called “lightning calculators”) developed areas of expertise in performing calculations that seem astonishing, even unbelievable, to the rest of us. One such specialty is calculating the 8-digit root of a Continue reading
Those of us who enjoy our expeditions through the lost world of nomography quickly discover that many original sources that are still considered masterpieces in the field have never been translated into English. In my case this is a serious Continue reading
I have researched and written about methods of mental calculation over the years, and I m often surprised at the ingenuity evident in the mathematical methods developed specifically for it. Based on my Lightning Calculator series of essays here, I ve created Continue reading
Part I of this essay described and analyzed Charles Lallemand s L Abaque Triomphe, the first published example of a graphical computer called a hexagonal chart. Here we discuss the mathematical principles behind hexagonal charts and provide examples of these charts from Continue reading