Brendan O'Connor at, AI and Social Science has looked at a number of packages with which people might do statistical and related manipulations and computations, and compares them. Having used five of them (STATA and the items in the Python group being the exceptions, though I have had "try these out" on my agenda for some time), I agree broadly with what was said about the packages I have experience with - which suggests to me I can probably take seriously the assessment of the remainder.
A very handy and compact comparison. If you use statistics, take a look.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Incredibly simple ways to get rational approximations to square roots
Over at The Universe of Discourse, Mark Dominus talks about Archimedes and the square root of three pointing out that Archimedes needn't have had some mystical way of finding rational approximations to surds in order to figure that 265/153 is very close to the square root of three.
He points out that there's a simple enough pattern that Archimedes could have spotted and soon figured it out. That is true enough, but Archimedes could have got by, while being even less clever than that.
Let's consider a few simple facts:
(i) if a and b are close to the ratio √3:1 then 3b and a are also close to that ratio, with the error in the opposite direction and of similar magnitude
(ii) Hence (a+3b):(b+a) will be substantially closer* to √3:1 than a:b is
*(in fact it improves the error in the approximation of 3 by a2/b2 by a factor that rapidly goes to 2+√3, but Archimedes needn't have figured that fact out - he only needs to have noticed that 3b:a is also an approximation of √3:1, and (a+3b):(b+a) always seems to be a better approximation than he started with)
If we proceed in this fashion from the very ordinary starting point of 2:1 (and eliminate common factors as they pop up), we rapidly hit on Archimedes' ratio.
And you're there after maybe a couple of minutes of very simple computation, even if you're a much worse computer (in the original sense) than Archimedes doubtless was.
Not in the least mysterious, and a bonehead like me figured it out almost immediately. I'll wager a master like Archimedes realized something like this in even less time than it took me. It's so simple, he probably wouldn't have even bothered to write it down.
__________
(Later edit:)
What I have above appears to be basically the Bablyonian Method, on which Brent at The Math Less Traveled writes here.
I must have seen mention of this before (at least the phrase "Babylonian Method" sounds somewhat familiar). I have no doubt Archimedes was familiar with some version of it.
He points out that there's a simple enough pattern that Archimedes could have spotted and soon figured it out. That is true enough, but Archimedes could have got by, while being even less clever than that.
Let's consider a few simple facts:
(i) if a and b are close to the ratio √3:1 then 3b and a are also close to that ratio, with the error in the opposite direction and of similar magnitude
(ii) Hence (a+3b):(b+a) will be substantially closer* to √3:1 than a:b is
*(in fact it improves the error in the approximation of 3 by a2/b2 by a factor that rapidly goes to 2+√3, but Archimedes needn't have figured that fact out - he only needs to have noticed that 3b:a is also an approximation of √3:1, and (a+3b):(b+a) always seems to be a better approximation than he started with)
If we proceed in this fashion from the very ordinary starting point of 2:1 (and eliminate common factors as they pop up), we rapidly hit on Archimedes' ratio.
2 1 (a:b)
3 2 (3b:a)
5 3 (a+3b:b+a), which becomes our new a:b
9 5
7 4 (dividing out a common factor of 2 here)
12 7
19 11
33 19
26 15 (taking out another factor of 2)
45 26
71 41
123 71
97 56 (taking out a third factor of 2)
168 97
265 153
And you're there after maybe a couple of minutes of very simple computation, even if you're a much worse computer (in the original sense) than Archimedes doubtless was.
Not in the least mysterious, and a bonehead like me figured it out almost immediately. I'll wager a master like Archimedes realized something like this in even less time than it took me. It's so simple, he probably wouldn't have even bothered to write it down.
__________
(Later edit:)
What I have above appears to be basically the Bablyonian Method, on which Brent at The Math Less Traveled writes here.
I must have seen mention of this before (at least the phrase "Babylonian Method" sounds somewhat familiar). I have no doubt Archimedes was familiar with some version of it.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Nifty log-concave function post
John D Cook has a nifty post up about log-concave functions (in the latest Carnival of Mathematics). These include the log-concave densities, which have been popular objects of research in statistics in the last decade or so - they're a wide class of densities that have (as you might guess from John's article) some nice properties.
I'd like to write a longer, basic post about them sometime. The Wikipedia page doesn't really do them justice.
I'd like to write a longer, basic post about them sometime. The Wikipedia page doesn't really do them justice.
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