I've been using wordpress as my blogging platform since I first started, about 10 years ago. (In fact the first post I can find is dated March 30, 2008.) I chose wordpress.com back then because it was (a) free, and (b) supported mathematics through a version (or subset) of LaTeX. As I have used LaTeX extensively for …

Election mapping A few weeks ago there was a by-election in my local electorate (known as an electoral division) of Batman here in Australia. I was interested in comparing the results of this election with the previous election two years ago. In this division it's become a two-horse race: the Greens against the …

Presentations are a modern bugbear. Anybody in academia or business, or any professional field really, will have sat through untold hours of presentations. And almost all of them are terrible. Wordy, uninteresting, too many "transition effects", low information content, you know as well as I do. Pretty much …

Programming the Vigenère cipher is my go-to problem when learning a new language. It's only ever a few lines of code, but it's a pleasant way of getting to grips with some of the basics of syntax. For the past few weeks I've been wrestling with Haskell, and I've now got to the stage where a Vigenère program is in fact …

On November 18, 2017, a by-election was held in my suburb of Northcote, on account of the death by cancer of the sitting member. It turned into a two-way contest between Labor (who had held the seat since its inception in 1927), and the Greens, who are making big inroads into the inner city. The Greens candidate won, …

Every few years I decide to have a go at using a CAD package for the creation of 3D diagrams and shapes, and every time I give it up. There's simply too much to learn in terms of creating shapes, moving them about, and so on, and every system seems to have its own ways of doing things. My son (who is an expert in …

The circumference of an ellipse 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 …