PETERBE.COM

A lot of people say they're really bad in mathematics and number theory and I believe them, but after having read this article about a tribe in the Amazon I realise that the people I hear saying this are wrong.

These Amazonian people don't even have the notion of numbers.

"The word he [Gordon] translates as one means just a relatively small amount, the word for two means a relatively bigger amount," he said in an interview from Brazil.

And more interesting facts about the Piraha people:

"the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.

They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day."

Yesterday when I came back from my holiday in Crete I finally got my results from the last exams. I got a first with slightly less than 80% average on the last year. Should be happy now but I ain't. I studied hard during the last couple of weeks and I understood it should pay off.

Award Bachelor of Science Honours in Mathematical Science with Computer Science
Classification Class One

SquareOneTV is some sort of kids tv show from the 80's that aimed to entertain and teach kids about math. I never watched it as a kid because it was probably never aired in Sweden. Shame.

The funniest thing on their website got to be the video clips. Be sure not to miss the "One Billion is Big" by "The Fat Boys". Really made me laugh.

Many many years ago our math teacher at school left us with a little quiz to think over until the next class. We mustn't use a calculator and back then MS Excel didn't even exist. He told the quiz as a story about the famous German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.

When Carl went to school their math teacher gave the students a numerical task to solve and he who could calculate the answer the quickest would receive an apple as a price. The task was to sum up all the numbers from 1 to 100. So you start with 1, then 2 and the sum is so far 3. Next you add 3 so the sum is now 6 and so on. All the pupils started calculating really hard but Carl raised his hand and answer the correct sum without even writing anything down. The teacher of course asked if Carl had cheated or otherwise how he did it.

So what is the sum and how did Carl managed to calculate it so quickly? You won't need any formulas or any other advanced mathematics to work it out. If you want to use a computer, feel free but do you really have to?

Last Wednesday the 19th of May I finished my university degree with my final exam. It's been very stressful and I've studied hard the last couple of weeks despite the wonderfully tempting weather.

Three years of Mathematical Science with Computer Science at City University. Right now I feel a bit bored with the whole thing because it's been on my mind day and night for the past two weeks so I can't be asked to write anything lengthy on it. I doubt that I will miss it a lot. I've got a really good job which allows for much freedom so I do not fear getting stuck behind a desk from 9 to 5 every day.

On Monday morning I start work again. The company is still Fry-IT working as a web developer/programmer. It will be primarily to program Python server side code for the Zope web application server with email, SMS and relational databases.

Some time ago I wrote about the Google PageRank algorithm in Python. It's a matrix algorithm for calculating the PageRank values for every page in a web. All you have to do is define which pages links to which and the algorithm calculates the PageRanks for every page for you.

Now I'm going to try to illustrate it in practise for those of you who don't know what to do with a Python script.

Start calculating!
See the gallery of previous calculations.