Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Getting an elephants trunk to wiggle II

Enrico Fermi told Freeman Dyson "with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk".

 Phil Nelson kindly brought to my attention a nice paper
Drawing an elephant with four complex parameters
by Jürgen Mayer, Khaled Khairy, and Jonathon Howard


There is also an interactive Mathematica Demonstration that allows you to see how the quality of the fit increases with the number of parameters [but does not have a wiggling trunk!].
By at
Labels: , ,

1 comment:

  1. VijayNovember 2, 2013 at 8:52 AM

    Here is a version with a wiggling trunk

    http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~phy326/python/vonNeumann_elephant.py

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

What does this movie tell us about the modern university?

Last night, my wife and I watched the movie, Wit. You can watch the full movie here  (free with ads). I should warn that some of the conten...

  • Nobel Prize predictions for 2025
     This week Nobel Prizes will be announced. I have not done predictions since 2020 . This is a fun exercise. It is also good to reflect on w...
  • Ising model basics
    The Ising model is a paradigm in both statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. Today for most theorists it is so familiar that so...
  • NF - mysteries of a small molecule
    Nitrogen fluoride (NF) seems like a very simple molecule and you would think it would very well understood, particularly as it is small enou...