Time to make for a home for those occasional mathematical coding curios. I’ve kicked off with an analysis, using various Numpy approaches, of the gravity field around a square (or cubic) planet, inspired by a project my children were working on.
If you’ve ever wondered, this is what gravity looks like on the surface of a square planet (20 length units long, arbitrary gravitational units) …
… even though the surface would appear visually flat, it would only feel level in the centre of the face. Near a corner, you would feel like you were standing on a 45 degree slope, and because the surface would be visually flat, it would look like you could slide off the far end of it – weird and cool.
I imagine I’ll add to this over time. The bulk of learning to code for me through high school involved mathematical simulations of all kinds: motion of planets under gravity, double pendulums, Mandelbrot sets, L-systems, 3D projections, etc, etc. All that BASIC (and some C) code lost now, but I’ll keep my eye out for more interesting problems and compile them here.
See also ThoughtWorks “Shokunin” coding problems of a mathematical nature that have piqued my interest over time:
- Allocating tasks equally to children in remote schooling
- Estimating the fraction of clear paths in an office at various occupancy levels, while maintaining social distancing
- Calculating the kth counting-order permutation of the digits 1-9 (source)
