What does one do on the first day of a new year but write a blog post, and in it clearly delineate all plans for the coming year? Well, I'm doing the first part, but not the second, as I know that any plans will not be fulfilled - something always gets in the way. You will notice a complete absence of posts last year …

Steffensen's method is based on Newton's iteration for solving a non-linear equation \(f(x)=0\): \[ x\leftarrow x-\frac{f(x)}{f'(x)} \] Newton's method can fail to work in a number of ways, but when it does work it displays qudratic convergence; the number of correct signifcant figures roughly doubling at each step. …

As is well known, tanh-sinh quadrature takes an integral \[ \int_{-1}^1f(x)dx \] and uses the substitution \[ x = g(t) = \tanh\left(\frac{\pi}{2}\sinh t\right) \] to transform the integral into \[ \int_{-\infty}^{\infty}f(g(t))g'(t)dt. \] The reason this works so well is that the derivative \(g'(t)\) dies away at a …

An article by Bailey, Jeybalan and LI, "A comparison of three high-precision quadrature schemes", and available online here, compares Gauss-Legendre quadrature, tanh-sinh quadrature, and a rule where the nodes and weights are given by the error function and its integrand respectively. However, Nick Trefethen …

Note: This blog post is mainly computational, with a hint of proof-oriented mathematics here and there. For a more in-depth analysis, read the excellent article "Gauss, Landen, Ramanujan, the Arithmetic-Geometric Mean, Ellipses, pi, and the Ladies Diary" by Gert Akmkvist and Bruce Berndt, in The American …

In all the previous discussions of voting power, we have assumed that all winning coalitions are equally likely. But in practice that is not necessarily the case. Two or more voters may be opposed on so many issues that they would never vote the same way on any issues: such a pair of voters may be said to be …

As we have seen previously, it's possible to compute power indices by means of polynomial generating functions. We shall extend previous examples to include the Deegan-Packel index, in a way somewhat different to that of Alonso-Meijide et al (see previous post for reference). Again, suppose we consider the voting game …

We have explored the Banzhaf and Shapley-Shubik power indices, which both consider the ways in which any voter can be pivotal, or critical, or necessary, to a winning coalition. A more recent power index, which takes a different approach, was defined by Deegan and Packel in 1976, and considers only minimal winning …

Recently I friend and I wrote a semi-serious paper called "The geometry of impossible objects" to be delivered at a mathematics technology conference. The reviewer was not hugely complimentary, saying that there was nothing new in the paper. Well, maybe not, but we had fun pulling together some information …

Introduction and recapitulation Recall from previous posts that we have considered two power indices for computing the power of a voter in a weighted system; that is, the ability of a voter to influence the outcome of a vote. Such systems occur when the voting body is made up of a number of "blocs": these may …