Posts
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Apr 16, 2018
Simulating a dice based simulation of a Markov process
I do my best to follow evidence based teaching methodologies (see for example: Freeman et al. 2014: www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410). One topic I will be teaching this week in my game theory class is the Moran process. As an introduction to this my students will be using a variety of different sided dice (die?) to simulate the process themselves so as to understand the mathematical model. By it’s nature this process can take a while to complete, so theoretically my students could get bored by rolling a dice 40 times and not seeing anything happen. To understand what parameters would help avoid this, in this blog post I will simulate the activity (and not the Moran process itself).
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Apr 10, 2018
Finding a Big Bang (Number) Theory wedding date
In episode 17 of season 11 of the Big Bang Theory: “The Athenaeum Allocation” Sheldon (a character in the show) describes a wedding date (the 12th of May) as romantic because it has a specific property. In this post I’ll see what other dates in a given year have the same property. This will use the python library SymPy which is a great computer algebra system.
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Mar 28, 2018
Are dogs appreciated fairly on @dog_rates?
The best account on twitter is @dog_rates. This account offers a fundamentally important service by providing expert rating of dogs. In this blog post I am going to examine their tweets and try to make sure that all dogs are appreciated appropriately by followers of the account. This is important, by using some statistical techniques (for the purposes of being fancy I could choose to call linear regression: machine learning) I will check that the number of likes and retweets a dog gets isn’t influenced by the rating chosen by @dog_rates because after all: they are good dogs Brunt.
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Feb 21, 2018
Drawing radar plots in LaTeX with tikz
In this blog post I’ll show some LaTeX code (tikz) for drawing radar plots.
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Feb 7, 2018
Verifying a neat identity: showing a connection between linear algebra and calculus
My PhD student Nikoleta and I are doing some work relating the Prisoner’s Dilemma to quadratic forms (a linear algebraic generalisation of quadratics) and it’s led me to really come to appreciate a specific identity regarding their derivatives. In this post I’ll describe what the identity is and what it means but also verify it using Python.
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