Astuteness and the Mathematician

Sometimes, I get surprised by colleagues and friends who show remarkable flashes of brilliance when discussing things or when drawing conclusions during our discussions. Most of the time, I enjoy intelligent conversation. There are times when I find that being in a conversation is itself given to folly, especially since, discussions with the wrong crowd [...]

World Pi Day

Captcha is the online tool which asks you for the letters in an image as part of an authentication process. While usually it shows a short string of characters that you have to identify, Captcha has been taken a bit far by one particular website, on World Pi day (3/14 of every year, obviously from [...]

Discrete Event Models and Real Life

I remember being fascinated by first person shooter games like Unreal and Quake and when I fiddled around with the Unreal Editor and other similar software (Q3Radiant, for instance), I discovered the field of Finite State Machines. FSMs are such an interesting area, and I was unaware that such a deep logic was hidden behind [...]

Pachelbel’s Canon and Flapping Wing Flight

The physics of flapping wings is a codification of airflow, momenta, harmonic motions of wings and infintesimally small particles of air, all interwoven into a seamless lift and thrust producing system. It is hard to imagine that something like this can manifest in the workings of birds all over. I see pictures of an albatros, as [...]

The Physics of Stone Skipping

I found a paper that explains how stones skip over water and explains the physics of stone skipping through a mathematical model. The paper constructs a mathematical model of the actual process of impact of a stone on water, and the lift and drag forces generated on the stone from the impact. A very insightful [...]