Mike’s Notebook

Drop a needle of length $L$ onto a hardwood floor with floorboards of width $W$. On average, the needle crosses $2L / \pi W$ lines between floorboards, a classic result of Buffon. But that $\pi$ in the formula means there’s a circle hiding somewhere. The trick to finding it? Bend the needle into a noodle. A single noodle, before being dropped Floor with ruled lines, with one noodle highlighted Drops K 0 Avg crossings (observed) — 2L / πW — Total turn Θ° 75° Segments N 4 Length L/W 2.0 Drops K 200 Reset Needle (Θ = 0°) π-circle From needle to noodle The usual approach to Buffon’s problem involves a double integral. Respectable, but this hides the circle at the heart of the solution, and frankly, I don’t love doing integrals. Instead, we’ll derive the result1 by going from a straight needle, to a curvy noodle, to a circle. All we need is some basic geometric reasoning and probability. ...

Note: This is an edited version of the original post. Thanks to Prof. Rolf Schnieder for alerting me that the Spherical Hadwiger conjecture remains open. Sometime in late 2012 or early 2013, Joel Tropp, Martin Lotz, Dennis Amelunxen, and I were all discussing some integral-geometric problem or another, and the topic of projections of convex cones came up. One of us made the observation that taking the linear image of a subspace in general position yields one of two results: ...

With my first guitar, I also got my first guitar tuner, a device that I have mixed feelings about. I can’t tune my guitar without it, but the tuner exposes just how fickle the concept of being “in tune” really is. The author with his guitar, trying to look cool, circa 2021. There are many reasons that it’s hard to tune your guitar, from the weather to number theory.1 This post adds another reason to this already long list: ...

What good are aesthetics? I’ve always found that my aesthetic sense provides a strong motivation for my work. Whether I’m diving into a mathematical formula, writing a paper, or creating software, I find that it’s the ineffable beauty that makes it worth undertaking. I’m not going to claim that the design or packaging is more important than the content. But the look and feel of a product is an inextricable part of the product; the way I construct and present my work is guided by my sense of interacting with it. When I write code, I see beauty and rhythm in the syntax highlighting, line breaks, bracket location. I find it painful to engage with ugly, yet beauty will literally appear in my dreams, whether code, the sound a smoothly clasping latch, or the smell of a flower. ...