Posts Tagged: mathematics

  • Tim Entwisle and John Entwisle at William Dalrymple at Sydney City Recital Hall 31 October 2024.

    Algorithm and algebra

    William Dalrymple and The Golden Road My younger son, John, recently (31 October 2024) took me to a lecture by the historian William Dalrymple, who was promoting his most recent book, The Golden Road. He tells the story of India’s role as a cultural and scientific superpower of the ancient world and as a major […]

  • Sherlock Holmes sits in a chair behind him is a wall of heiroglyphics-representing our word of the week cipher.

    Ciphers and codes—zeros and naughts

    Is there a difference between cipher and code? I have always considered cipher and code to be synonymous—meaning a message translated into symbols to hide its meaning (indeed this is how a lot of dictionaries define them). But consider Morse Code—it was designed not to be secret but to be easier to transmit and receive […]

  • Robot B9 from the 1960s TV sci-fi program Lost in Space with speech bubble "It does not compute"

    I reckon its a computer

    Is computer a new word? If there was a word that you would expect to have been coined in our times it would be computer. A computer is defined as an electronic device for storing and processing data. It does so in binary form, according to instructions given to it in a variable program (according to […]

  • Cooking with thirteen--13 eggs, a bakers dozen loaves of bread, at 13 past 13 with 13 ibis lurking on the lawn.

    The century turns thirteen

    The twenty-first century is having its thirteenth birthday. Thirteen is a native word to English. It comes to us from the Old English languages, þreotene from Mercian and þreotiene from West Saxon. It is a combination of þreo for three and -tene, -tiene meaning ten more than. Thirteen has a stigma as an unlucky number […]

  • Australia's own psephologist Anthony Green

    UK psephologists are counting pebbles

    The polls are opening in Great Britain. Will Gordon Brown lose badly and end Labour’s run of power? Psephologists are making predictions.

  • Alfred the Great ten out of ten

    2010 points to Alfred the Great

    It is the Year Two Thousand and Ten, Twenty-Ten or Oh-Ten. It is Something Ten and not the Year Something Decem, as it would be in Latin, or Something Deka, as it would be in Greek. Ten is proudly an Old English word, uninfluenced for more than a millennium by foreign language pretensions or even by marauding heathen hordes