User:Gandalf61
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Contents |
[edit] Introduction
I very much welcome comments on any of my contributions (naming, format, style, contents, usefulness etc etc) - post a message at User_talk:Gandalf61.
As for myself ... I am British so I enjoy :
- The outstanding comedy of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers
- The animation of Nick Park
- Singing along with Flanders & Swann
- Eating Marmite on toast
- Drinking dandelion and burdock and warm beer (but not both at the same time)
- ... and playing Diplomacy, Risk and, of course, Mornington Crescent
[edit] Motto of the day
Wikipedia, anyone?
[edit] Articles
Articles that I have started or made a substantial contribution to include :
[edit] 2003
- Abstract structure - a gap that needed filling because there was a link to it from the mathematics page
- Proof by exhaustion - an important method of mathematical proof that has some controversial applications
- Constructive proof - a complement to the nonconstructive proof article, and completes a link from mathematical proof
- Generating function - replaced a redirect to formal power series with an article on different types of generating functions and their uses
- Farey sequence - just couldn't resist filling out the previous stub
- Ford circle - a natural link from Farey sequence
- Kepler conjecture - a fascinating problem, and an example of proof by exhaustion
- Sphere packing - a requested article that provides context for the Kepler conjecture
- Mathematics as a language - completes a link from mathematical proof
- Flanders and Swann - expanded previous stub
- Polydivisible number - an intriguing backwater in recreational mathematics
- Octave Chanute - American railroad engineer and aviation pioneer
- Coniston Water - scene of Donald Campbell's death in 1967
[edit] 2004
- Abstraction (mathematics) - link from abstract structure
- Riemann hypothesis - added history section
- St. Elsewhere - new article
- Modular group - expanded existing article
- Fractal - added history section
- Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture - added background section and expanded rest of article
- Julia set - amended general definition of Julia set
- Fatou set - new article, link from Julia set
- Lucas sequence - new article, link from Fibonacci pseudoprime
- Disquisitiones Arithmeticae - new article, link from Carl Friedrich Gauss and number theory
- Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie - new article, link from number theory
- Mathematical beauty - re-write of existing article
- Mathematics and art - split out from mathematical beauty
- How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension - new article, link from fractal
- Voronoi diagram - added history section
- Project Excelsior - new article, link from Joseph Kittinger
- Pendine Sands - new article, written because I went there on holiday
- K'nex - expanded previous stub
- Rare Earth hypothesis - made existing article less rhetorical, more NPOV
- Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life - new article, book by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart
- Moving average (finance) - a family of common technical analysis techniques that deserved their own article
- Lyapunov fractal - expanded previous stub
- Apollonian gasket - new article on a very beautiful fractal
- Benoît Mandelbrot - expanded existing article
- Lévy C curve - new article, link from fractal
- Lévy flight - expanded previous stub
- Lévy's constant - new article
- Paul Pierre Lévy - expanded previous stub
- Ruth Lawrence - expanded previous stub
- Notes & Queries - new article celebrating 15th anniversary of column in The Guardian
[edit] 2005
- Zeckendorf's theorem - new article, referenced in Fibonacci number
- Edouard Zeckendorf - new article
- Mathematics education - re-wrote and expanded previous stub
- A Mathematician's Apology - expanded previous stub
- Hans von Mangoldt - new article
- von Mangoldt function - example of an arithmetic function that is neither multiplicative nor additive
- Padovan sequence - new article
- Plastic number - re-wrote previous stub
- Dyadic transformation - re-wrote previous stub
- Tent map - expanded and re-wrote previous stub. Tent map exhibits a wide range of dynamic behaviours in a fairly simple context.
- Poincaré-Bendixson theorem - new article
- List of Cambridge mathematicians - extended previous stub list
[edit] 2006
- Carmichael's theorem - replaced redirect
- Midy's theorem - new article
- p-adic number - re-wrote Introduction section and added references
- trimorphic number - new article, extends concept of automorphic number
- henagon and digon - expanded previous stubs
- ideal triangle - new article, linked from hyperbolic triangle
- A. Cohn's irreducibility criterion - expanded previous stub
- Anderton Boat Lift - expanded previous stub; added diagrams
- Regular Polytopes (book) - new article
[edit] 2007
- Indra's Pearls - new article
- Graphical timeline of the Big Bang - made timeline consistent with times given in the individual early universe epoch articles, and wrote new article on the quark epoch
[edit] Things I Have Learned From Wikipedia
To help me remember why I contribute to Wikipedia, this is a list (in no particular order) of things that I did not know until I read about them here.
- A concrete canoe can resurface even after it is submerged.
- The unknown soldier is not always unknown.
- The Perpetual virginity of Mary is a doctrine of the Catholic Church.
- The 3D equivalent of a Koch snowflake fills a cube.
- Pica is a unit of measure in typography; the genus of the magpie; and the medical term for an appetite for non-foods.
- An unpopped popcorn kernel is known as an "old maid".
- The M96 motorway is not open to the public, but has appeared in a television documentary.
- The Triangulum Galaxy is probably the furtherest object visible with the naked eye. It is about 400,000 light years further away than the Andromeda Galaxy.
- A square wheel can give a smooth ride on a bumpy road.
- Hedgehog Day is a (probably fictitious) Ancient Roman equivalent of Groundhog Day.
- Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, read mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, and graduated with honours.
- The gravitational sphere of influence of one body that is in orbit around another larger body is known as its Hill sphere.
- In addition to Charon, Pluto has two other moons, called Nix and Hydra.
- A crime commited by an astronaut on the International Space Station would fall under the jurisdiction of the home country of the alleged perpetrator.
- Salvador Dali's last painting, The Swallow's Tail, is about catastrophe theory.
- The Danjon scale is used to measure the visbility of the Moon during a total lunar eclipse.
- In medieval Europe, the barnacle goose was believed to be born from a barnacle. This allowed Catholics to eat it during Lent, as it was classified as a fish.
- Ingesting silver or silver compounds can turn your skin blue - a condition known as argyria.
- Mountbatten pink, used as naval camouflage paint by Louis Mountbatten in World War II, is a mixture of medium gray with a small amount of Venetian red.
[edit] To Do
Create/expand history sections in following articles : hyperbolic geometry, quadratic reciprocity, prime number theorem, Euler-Mascheroni constant ...
Write articles on world water speed record, Bluebird (car) and Bluebird (boat)
[edit] BarnStars
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The Working Man's Barnstar | |
| For your tireless and helpful work in the Reference desks. Jones2 10:55, 31 December 2006 (UTC) |
