Tag: Just for Fun

Learn SAS
Rick Wicklin 0
The elliptical heart

Some hearts are famous. For example, there is the "Heart of Gold" (Neil Young), the "Heart of Glass" (Blondie), and the Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad). But have you heard of the "Heart of Ellipses"? No? Well, in 2023, Ted Conway published an amusingly titled article, "Total Ellipse of the

Analytics
Rick Wicklin 0
Intransitive dice

Most games of skill are transitive. If Player A wins against Player B and Player B wins against Player C, then you expect Player A to win against Player C, should they play. Because of this, you can rank the players: A > B > C Interestingly, not all games

Rick Wicklin 0
Animate snowfall in SAS

Out of the bosom of the Air,     Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken, Over the woodlands brown and bare,     Over the harvest-fields forsaken,         Silent, and soft, and slow         Descends the snow. "Snow-flakes" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Happy holidays to all my readers! In my last post I showed

Rick Wicklin 0
Create a Koch snowflake with SAS

I have a fondness for fractals. In previous articles, I've used SAS to create some of my favorite fractals, including a fractal Christmas tree and the "devil's staircase" (Cantor ) function. Because winter is almost here, I think it is time to construct the Koch snowflake fractal in SAS. A

Rick Wicklin 0
Visualize the Cantor function in SAS

I was a freshman in college the first time I saw the Cantor middle-thirds set and the related Cantor "Devil's staircase" function. (Shown at left.) These constructions expanded my mind and led me to study fractals, real analysis, topology, and other mathematical areas. The Cantor function and the Cantor middle-thirds

Rick Wicklin 0
Lo, how a polar rose e'er blooming

Lo how a rose e'er blooming From tender stem hath sprung As I write this blog post, a radio station is playing Chrismas music. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the old German hymn that many of us know as "Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming." I was humming

Rick Wicklin 0
Mathematical art: Weaving matrices

An artist friend of mine recently created a beautiful abstract image and described the process on her blog. She says that "after painting my initial square, I cut it into strips and split them down the middle, then wove them together.... I had no idea when I started piecing these

Rick Wicklin 0
The distribution of Pythagorean triples by angle

Last week I was chatting with some mathematicians and I mentioned the blog post that I wrote last year on the distribution of Pythagorean triples. In my previous article, I showed that there is an algorithm that uses matrix multiplication to generate every primitive Pythagorean triple by starting with the

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