Cold Owl

1. Sudoku Solver
2. Socal-Search.com
3. Summer School Probablilty (CSUN MATH 340) ;-Þ

I had somewhat of an epiphany in class today. People and their ancestral backgrounds could be represented through numbers!

I will use the idea of the Greatest Common Denominator (gcd) to represent there a way to show the closest ancestor of two people. I don’t see how this is practical in anyway (other than a mental exercise); it is just to show a working representation.

Numerical Practice

First let’s stroll back to lovely elementary school. What is the greatest common divisor of 6 and 25? The divisors for 6 are 1, 2, 3, and 6. The divisors for 25 are 1, 5, and 25. The greatest common divisor is 1. If the greatest common divisor of two numbers is 1, then the two numbers are said to be relatively prime.
Let’s try another example. What is the greatest common divisor of 18 and 27? The divisors of 18 are 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, and 18. The divisors of 27 are 1, 3, 9, and 27. The greatest common divisor of 18 and 27 is 9.

Numerical Application

Assume that every person on earth shares at least one relative. We’ll call this relative, Eve. If two people have only one common ancestor, we could then say they are relatively prime and that they’re closest common is Eve. If this is not the case, then the two people share a closer ancestor that is not Eve.

Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, has been identified as a distant cousin to Dick Cheney. Now their greatest common ancestor is not eve but someone that is much closer in terms of generations than eve. That ancestor could be represented as a number. The gcd(Obama,Cheney)=Closest Common Ancestor (CCA) of Obama and Cheney. The CCA in this case happens to be someone other than eve, so the CCA's value is not equal to one.

A better example would be twin siblings. Their greatest common ancestor would be their mother, I suppose fathers could be a second answer too. For now I'll just leave the common ancestors to be female for this representation of people and their ancestors. Another example could be a mother and a daughter. The mother would be the closest common ancestor of the two people.

For more information on the greatest common divisor see the following links:

1. Wiki on GCD
2. Wolfram on GCD

I've decided to create a Math Mumble extension to the site. It will consist of a catalog of blogs and pages of math intuitions that I decide to contribute to the site. More to Follow!!!!

    I constructed a Reuleaux triangle, pentagon, and 9-gon at work the other day. I found it amusing to see how small the Reuleaux polygons were from the original side length of the polygons. Here is the mathematica notebook, and an image of the Reuleaux Pentagon I made. Note: the Reuleaux pentagon is shaded in black in the picture. :-Þ

    Math is supposed to be precise. It's the core for the sciences, but there are times with the science professors decide that it is okay to gloss over steps, 'dumb it down', or chuck the precise definitions of items for one reason or another. Nothing more in the world frustrates me. If one is a math major, looking at how math is applied in other subjects, it can be very frustrating.

    As a double major, I see this often in economics and in my 'extra curricular' classes such as physics. In undergrad economics, many variables are not defined precisely in the beginning. I've asked and complained to my professor about these shortcomings in economics and his reasoning, or what seems to be the economic school at CSUN or for most universities in America it seems like, is that undergraduate economics is intended to be dumbed down for simplicity. Many find physics as difficult, such as myself. The problem that I have with physics is that it too is also dumbed down. "Memorize this formula....or else". This method of teaching physics deliberately removes the understanding of it all and replace it with more techniques to solve problems on a test.

    I've become more accepting of what rigors math can have, and it becomes a frustration when others don't hold up those same rigors. Oh well, what is a math major undergrad to do?