This year (2009) is the 400th anniversary of the publication of Johannes Kepler’s book New Astronomy (Astronomia Nova) announcing the discovery of the elliptical orbit of Mars to the world. The discovery of the elliptical orbit of Mars and the mathematical rule of motion for Mars on its elliptical...

Searching for documents and other items on the Web or computers is often tedious and time consuming. Time is money. Highly paid professionals spend hours, days, and even longer searching for information on the Web or computers. Most search today is done using key word and phrase matching, often combined...

Project Euler can be an addictive site for people who are passionate about mathematics and programming. You don’t need to be an expert in either of these two disciplines to participate in it’s challenges, but any such skills you may already possess will be an asset. The author of the site,...

An algorithm is a procedure or formula for solving a problem. For the purposes of this article, a complex algorithm is defined as an algorithm that embodies advanced mathematical or logical methods and requires at least one thousand (1000) lines of the C/C++ programming language to implement. The term C/C++...

Seven years ago Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science. I remember the hype surrounding this book. Journalists jumped at the chance to praise a heavy tome that was too complex for most of them to fully understand, but that shipped with an ambitious title and the implicit guarantee that comes from a...

Cheat sheets can be very useful and make for great posters around your room. The following is a collection of 13 cheat sheets for several mathematical topics and programs: General Math Cheat Sheet (iPaper and other formats) Elementary Algebra Cheat Sheet (PDF) Trigonometry Cheat Sheet (PDF) Calculus Cheat...

gnuplot is an excellent scientific package for visualizing data and plotting functions. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the GNU project, even though it’s Open Source and entirely free. This tool is very handy whenever you need to produce production quality graphics from a given data-set (or...

The Jenkins-Traub Algorithm is a standard in the field of numerical computation of polynomial roots, fundamentally developed as a numerical algorithm specifically for the task of computing polynomial roots. In other words, (i) because it was planned from the outset for numerical purposes rather than being...