Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
That's part of the underlying assumption behind the pushback against Florida Gov. Rick Scott's latest STEM initiative: A crusade by humanities professors against Florida governor Rick Scott may be, contrary to their intentions, another sign of the suicide of American education. Scott has proposed lowering tuition rates for students majoring in STEM (science, technology, engineering, …
Continue reading "Do We Really Need GenEd to Make Thinking People?"
Every now and then an article on a supposedly "obscure" subject leaps at you. One of those was "Children Who Disappeared in Britain" by Deborah Cohen of Northwestern University. It chronicles the history of the Normansfield Training Institution near London, from its opening to its ignominious end in 1997. It's significant because it follows the …
Continue reading "When a Little Darwinian Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing"
From the Stromata (Miscellanies) II, 4: Should one say that Knowledge is founded on demonstration by a process of reasoning, let him hear that first principles are incapable of demonstration; for they are known neither by art nor sagacity. For the latter is conversant about objects that are susceptible of change, while the former is …
Continue reading "Clement of Alexandria on Knowlege and Reason"
Amidst all the adulation surrounding the elevation of Jorge Bergoglio to become Pope Francis I, there is one thing that many overlook: that he started out his academic career as a chemist. New Atheists would have us believe that scientific education will make us like them. But this is only true when we make science …
Well, we may not be quite up to 106, but... A federal mandate to remove old, abandoned oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico is blowing up a lot more than just the rigs. Undercover video obtained by Local 15 shows thousands of pounds of dead fish, mostly red snapper, floating to the …
Our objective is to develop an element with the following characteristics: Two-dimensional, two node element Euler-Bernoulli beam theory Axial stiffness (``spar'' type element) "Beam on elastic foundation'' characteristic Axial elastic resistance Although it is doubtless possible to start with a single weak-form equation and develop the stiffness matrix, it is more convenient to develop the …
The problem here is to develop a routine that will determine one or more eigenvalues of a matrix using Newton's method and considering the eigenvalue problem to be that of a nonlinear equation solution problem. The simplest way to illustrate the problem and its solution is to use a 4 $latex \times$4 matrix. Let us …
Continue reading "Use of Netwon’s Method to Determine Matrix Eigenvalues"
A few months ago I ran a piece entitled Fading Glory, where I made the following observation re the place where I'm working on my PhD in Computational Engineering: One of the things my advisor oriented us about were the substantial computer capabilities that the SimCentre has. “Substantial” is a relative term; at one point …
Continue reading "The Fading Glory Problem Affects the Prediction of Hurricane Sandy"
Every now and then you'll hear a news item about someone's math problem being controversial (involving slavery, etc.) This gem has been around for a long time: it comes from Marvin Marcus' A Survey of Finite Mathematics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969). It's purpose is to illustrate the use of combinatorial matrix theory, and (stripping …
Continue reading "Math and the Middle East: Some Things Never Change"
I was pleasantly surprised at Douglas Rushkoff's article that advocates teaching kids in the U.S. how to code (program, for some of the rest of us) a computer. I'd like to add some personal experience to this, as coding has been a large part of my computer experience. Almost forty years ago, my father and …
Positive Infinity 