Category Archives: mathematica

Creating supplemental texts

Posted on April 28, 2013 by

I’m nearing the end of a semester where, for one class, there was no official text. That’s going decently well, though I’ll likely have more to say about that in another post. What I want to talk about here are … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, syllabus creation, teaching | 18 Comments

Lagrange multipliers

Posted on March 3, 2013 by

This is a post that builds on my previous notes about the calculus of variations. This week I’m going to teach about modeling constraint forces using the Lagrangian approach, and I wanted to put these notes down for my current … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics, teaching | Leave a comment

Snails on a triangle

Posted on February 2, 2013 by

This post got its spark when I read this These challenging physics problems found by @MrHonner are awesome. mrhonner.com/2013/01/24/cha…— John Burk (@occam98) January 30, 2013 John had also mentioned the list in last week’s Global Physics Department meeting, and I … Continue reading →

Posted in math, mathematica, teaching | 3 Comments

Lake ice thickness

Posted on January 28, 2013 by

OOPS: I posted this late at night and as I laid down to bed afterwards I realized that I was using the wrong . I was using the one for water, not ice. Ice is larger by a factor of 4, … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics | 4 Comments

Summer project: more twirling chains

Posted on December 18, 2012 by

There are three main origins of this post: I really like playing with twirling chains. Yet another example of how mixing analytical and numeric approaches in Mathematica can be cool. This seems like a cool distributed project for next summer. … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics, research | 3 Comments

Matching students with projects

Posted on October 15, 2012 by

The 2012 Nobel Prize in economics went to Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley for work they did on market-matching theories. These theories work to optimize the matching of items from one list to items in another, especially when preference is … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, teaching | 6 Comments

What I need from FOSS

Posted on September 29, 2012 by

Contrary to what some of my friends might think, I’ve been really sympathetic to  the arguments against Mathematica that talk about how it’s not Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). I’m always happy to see what my friends and colleagues produce with … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics, teaching | 12 Comments

Slinky drop analysis

Posted on June 3, 2012 by

Over the last year there’s been a lot of posting and questioning about what happens to the bottom of a slinky when you drop the top. Here’s a good video from my friend Derek showing people’s expectations, along with some … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics | Leave a comment

Gyroscopic precession

Posted on May 26, 2012 by

There have been some interesting things on the interwebs, lately, about rotation, gyroscopes, precession, and helicoptors (all of it brought to my attention, or literally done by, Derek Muller of Veritasium fame). It got me thinking about the modeling I’ve done … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, math, mathematica, physics, teaching | 6 Comments

Helmholtz coil approximations

Posted on April 22, 2012 by

My friend Joss Ives got this blog post rolling with this tweet: When measuring the radius of a Helholtz coil which has some decent thickness in the r-direction, do you measure to inside, outside or middle— Joss Ives (@jossives) April … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics | 6 Comments