Publications by Jerry Tuttle
Taylor Swift and Data Analysis
Taylor Swift and Data Analysis. by Jerry Tuttle Who will be the most talked-about celebrity before, during, and after the Super Bowl?...
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Using great circle distance to determine Twin Cities
In the US we think of Minneapolis and St. Paul as the Twin Cities, but Ben Olin, author of Math with Bad Drawings, https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/, posed this data science question: Which U.S. cities are the true twin cities? He imposed three conditions: the cities must be at most 10 miles apart, each city must have at least 200,000 people, a...
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Ten Lords-a-Leaping
Just what is a lord-a-leaping? Well, what is a lord? A lord is a title of nobility, usually inherited, that exists in the UK and other countries. And those lords like to leap, especially during the twelve days of Christmas. The song the Twelve Days of Christmas is a well-known Christmas song, whose earliest known publication was in London in 1...
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Black hole word numbers in multiple languages
A few months ago I used R to investigate black hole word numbers in the English language. A friend suggested there are probably black hole word numbers in other languages. There are only three other languages that I have a nodding acquaintance of (spoken languages, not computer languages), and all three do have such black holes. Here is the resul...
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Barbie and math
With the Barbie movie coming out, I think it’s time to review Barbie and math. If the original Barbie doll were an actual woman, she would be 5’9″ tall, have a 39-inch bust, 18-inch waist, 33-inch hips, a size 3 shoe, a weight of 110 pounds, a BMI of 16.24, and perhaps would be anorexic. Obviously these measurements are unrealistic and send...
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Happy Pi Approximation Day
Many people know March 14 is celebrated as Pi Day because 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant digits of π (using the month, day date format). I just learned that July 22 is celebrated as Pi Approximation Day (using the day/month date format) because 22/7 is a common approximation of π . π Is defined as the ratio of a circle’s cir...
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A more interesting pictorial numerical puzzle
I am getting tired of these little pictorial numerical puzzles with the four equations, like one where three chickens equals 60, one chicken plus two plates of two eggs per plate equals 26, and so on, until the final equation is to evaluate some mathematical expression involving chickens, eggs, and bananas. The solution generally requires that yo...
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There’s a black hole in the number line
The government doesn’t want you to know about this, but I have discovered it and I will share this with a few close friends: There is a black hole in the number line, and it’s at number 4. Every word in the English language will eventually fall into it and can’t get out of it. As an example, take the word mathematical. Mathematical has twe...
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Find the next number in the sequence
Find the next number in the sequence by Jerry Tuttle Between ages two and four, most children can count up to at least ten. If you ask your child, "What number comes next after 1, 2, 3, 4, 5?" they will probably say "6." But to math nerds, any number can be the next number in a finite sequence. I like -14. Given a sequence of n real numbers ...
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“Those who can, do; those who can’t – use computer simulation.”
“Those who can, do; those who can’t – use computer simulation.” This quote was inspired by playwright George Bernard Shaw. Computer simulation is a powerful tool that attempts to reproduce the behavior of some real-world system by sampling from one or more probability distributions. It can help explain and illu...
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