Software development. Tech punditry. Retro gaming.
Everyone outside the US will be familiar with the standard paper size used in offices around the world, known as A4. You may also be aware that there are other A-series paper sizes, such as the larger A3. Perhaps you have also heard of the B-series sizes.
Have you ever wondered why A4 is the size and shape …
For many of us, we are entering the holiday season. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, we wish you all the best for the holidays and the New Year.
The Christmas tree has its origins in medieval and pagan traditions going back centuries. Today, the tree is, as the name suggests, associated with Christmas. Here in Australia, it is not …
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, …