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 stronghold for all …

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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 post I …

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So the Australian federal election of 2022 is over as far as the public is concerned; all votes have been cast and now it’s a matter of waiting while the Australian Electoral Commission tallies the numbers, sorts all the preferences, and arrives at a result. Because of the complications of the voting system, and of all …

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This post illustrates the working of Ramanujan’s generating functions for solving Euler’s diophantine equation \(a^3+b^3=c^3+d^3\) as described by Andrews and Berndt in “Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook, Part IV”, pp 199 - 205 (Section 8.5). The text is available from Springer. Ramanujan’s result is that if [ f_1(x) = …

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Wordle is a pleasant game, basically Mastermind with words. You choose an English word (although it can also be played in other languages), and then you’re told if your letters are incorrect, correct but in the wrong place, or correct and in the right place. These are shown by the colours grey, yellow, and green. The …

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I was going to make a little post about Wordle, but I go sidetracked exploring five letter words. At the same time, I had a bit of fun with regular expressions and some simple scripting with ZSH. The start was to obtain lists of 5-letter words. One is available at the Stanford Graphbase site; the file sgb-words.txt …

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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 …

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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. …

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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 …

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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 of Oxford …

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