In an enterprise such as the building of the atomic bomb the difference between ideas, hopes, suggestions and theoretical calculations, and solid numbers based on measurement, is paramount. All the committees, the politicking and the plans would have come to naught if a few unpredictable nuclear cross...

People often assume that theoretical mathematical calculations and computer simulations will work well enough that machines or experiments will work successfully the first time or at most within a few tries (or similar levels of performance in other contexts). This belief is often implicit in the promotion...

The Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb during World War II is the exemplar of modern Big Science. Numerous mostly unsuccessful modern scientific megaprojects have been promoted and justified by invoking the successful example of the Manhattan Project. Even sixty-six years after the first...

The Game of Life is a simple cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Conway. The Game of Life consists of a two dimensional grid of cells. Each cell can be “live” or “dead”, often represented mathematically by 1 and 0. The grid is updated periodically in discrete time steps...

An associative array, also known as a dictionary, map, mapping, or hash table, is a powerful data structure that is built into many modern programming languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby, and many others. An associative array is a form of content addressable memory (CAM). For example, when you see...

At least since Sputnik in 1957, various tests and reports such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have asserted that students in the United States perform surprisingly poorly in math and science compared to students in other nations. The poor state of education is a...

Introduction This is the fourth article in an occasional series of articles about Octave, a free open-source numerical programming environment that is mostly compatible with MATLAB.  This series began with the article Octave: An Alternative to the High Cost of MATLAB.  This article discusses plotting and...

The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project’s outcome; it is to determine whether a project’s targets are realistic enough to allow the project to be controlled to meet them. — attributed to Steve McConnell, Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black...

Introduction This is the second in a series of articles on mathematical programming starting with The Scope of Mathematical Programming Projects. This article discusses LAME (LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder), a widely used free open-source MP3 (MPEG Layer 3) audio encoder. MP3 is probably the most widely...

Introduction This is the third in a series of articles on Octave starting with Octave, An Alternative to the High Cost of MATLAB. Octave is a free, both free as in beer and free as in speech, MATLAB compatible numerical programming tool available under the GNU General Public License. In part because MATLAB...