Software development. Tech punditry. Retro gaming.
The Sierpiński triangle is what is known as a fractal – a geometric shape that shows structure at arbitrarily small scale, often with a similar appearance as the scale changes. The Sierpiński triangle is basically an equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles, ad infinitum. It is named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński, although the pattern …
At some point in high school students are taught about factorials. A fairly simple concept, the factorial of a non-negative whole number is written as n! and defined as the product (that means you multiply the numbers) of all the positive whole numbers less than or equal to that number. So 5! = 5 ⨉ 4 ⨉ 3 ⨉…
Thinking back to high school you may remember being taught about pi and using it in maths classes to calculate perimeters and areas of circles. You may remember being told a good approximation of pi is 3.14, or 22/7. But you may also recall that pi is irrational (meaning, in maths, that it cannot be expressed exactly as …
I work with a number of younger software engineers, so occasionally I’ll say something that demonstrates a sizeable generation gap. Usually it is because I’ve mentioned the lyrics of a song from the 80s, or some early 80s television show.
The other day I found myself more than a little surprised. I was explaining something to some of the boys, …