aaron

Infinity Mathematicians Walk Into a Bar

Infinity mathematicians walk into a bar. The first orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third orders a quarter beer, etc etc. How long until the bartender runs out of beer? First person to answer correctly with a full explanation gets a free beer next time we meet.

aaron

Calculating Color Brightness

I was working on a website today, and I stumbled into a problem of needing to compute the brightness of a color, so that if it is a background color, I know whether to show white text or black text. My first thought was to simply add up the RGB components of the color and use that value. It turns out that is completely wrong, since pure green looks much brighter than pure...

aaron

Reduce the number of multiplications required for the product of two polynomials

This was a problem done in my CIS 315 Algorithms class in Spring 2006. The product of two linear polynomials ax+b and cx+d [tex]\LARGE (ax+b)(cx+d)[/tex] is [tex]\LARGE acx^2 + (ad+bc)x + bd[/tex] Note that this requires 4 different multiplications of the coefficients: ac, ad, bc and bd. We want to find a way to determine this product with only 3 multiplications. let: L = (a+b)(c+d) note what...