A bicentric heptagon is one for which all vertices lie on a circle, and for which all edges are tangential to another circle. If \(R\) and \(r\) are the radii of the outer and inner circles respectively, and \(d\) is the distance between their centres, there is an expression which relates the three values when a …

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Introduction Poncelet’s porism or Poncelet’s closure theorem is one of the most remarkable results in plane geometry. It is most easily described in terms of circles: suppose we have two circles \(C\) and \(D\), with \(D\) lying entirely inside \(C\). Pick a point \(p_0\) on \(C\), and find the tangent from \(p_0\) to …

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A totally different approach to dithering is error diffusion. Here, the image is scanned pixel by pixel. Each pixel is thresholded t0 1 or 0 depending on whether the pixel value is greater than 0.5 or not, and the error - the difference between the pixel value and its threshold - is diffuse across neighbouring pixels. …

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Image dithering, also known as half-toning, is a method for reducing the number of colours in an image, while at the same time trying to retain as much of its “look and feel” as possible. Originally this was required for newspaper printing, where no shades of grey were possible, and only black and white could be …

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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 …

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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 …

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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: roses, noses, notes, steno, stent, scent Because …

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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 …

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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 a time, …

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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 showing how much …

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