In the previous post, we saw that a small change to the method of false position provided much faster convergence, while retaining its bracketing.

This was the Illinois method which is only one of a whole host of similar methods, some of which converge even faster.

And as a reminder, here's its definition, with a very …

Read More

Such a long time since a last post! Well, that's academic life for you ...

If you look at pretty much any modern textbook on numerical methods, of which there are many, you'll find that the following methods will be given for the solution of a single non-linear equation \(f(x)=0\):

• direct iteration, also known as …

Read More

Carroll originally invented his Doublets in 1877, they were published in "Vanity Fair" (the magazine, not the Thackeray novel) in 1879. Some years later, in an 1892 letter, Carroll added another rule: that permutations were allowed. This allows very neat chains such as:

Read More

Apparently there's a version of Doublets (see previous post) which allows you to add or delete a letter each turn. Thus we can go from WHEAT to BREAD as

WHEAT, HEAT, HEAD, READ, BREAD

which is shorter than the ladder given in that previous post. However, we can easily adjust the material from that post to implement …

Read More

Lewis Carroll's game of Doublets

Such a long time since my last post! Well, that's the working life for you.

Anyway, recently I was reading about Lewis Carroll - always one of my favourite people - and was reminded of his word game "Doublets" in which one word is turned into another by changing one letter at …

Read More

Plagiarism, text matching, and academic integrity

Every modern academic teacher is in thrall to giant text-matching systems such as Ouriginal or Turnitin. These systems are sold as "plagiarism detectors", which they are not - they are text matching systems, and they generally work by providing a report …

Read More

What this post is about

In the previous post we showed how to set up a simple interactive map using Python and its folium package. As the example, we used a Federal electorate situated within the city of Melbourne, Australia, and the various voting places, or polling places (also known as polling "booths") …

Read More

Message about the underlying software

Leaflet version 1.80 was …

Read More

In this post we look at two Divisions from the recent Federal election: the inner city seat of Melbourne, and the bayside seat of Macnamara. Up until the recent election, Melbourne was the only Division to have a Greens representative. Macnamara, previously known as "Melbourne Ports" has been a Labor …
Read More

This continues on from the previous post, trying to make some sense of the voting in my electorate of Wills and the neighbouring electorate of Cooper. Both these electorates (or more formally "Divisions"), as I mentioned in the previous post, are very similar in their geography, demography, and history.

Last …

Read More