Pair Share II

By -
==> (0, 0), (2, 2), (7/4, 7/3), (-2, 2/3), (-1/4, 1/5), (1.001,1001.0).

What do all these pairs of numbers have in common? Only grade-school mathematics required.

Numeration is decimal (the conventional way).

Answer: All these pairs have equal sum and product. Here are equivalent formulations:

a> ==> m+n = mn.

b> ==> (m-1)(n-1) = 1

c> ==> m = a/b, n = a/c, where a = b+c.

Stay tuned for more on Fibonacci numbers and their ilk. Or maybe not...this hasn't been a good week for math posts. I understand that youall might be fresh out of intelligent comments, but that never stopped me when addressing your posts. What about woefully stupid comments? I don't see any of those either. Oh, well.

Comments

  1. gcallah7:29 AM

    Dear Wabulon, if you can find a way to attack Ron Paul with a math problem, you'll get lots of comments.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wabulon9:22 AM

    What is it with Ron Paul, anyhoo??

    ReplyDelete
  3. Bob Murphy6:33 PM

    Sorry Wabulon I have been coming to Crash Landing lately to relax. Your posts require too much concentration when I'm in a lazy mood.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wabulon10:09 PM

    Dear Bob, Don't they have amphetamine where you live??

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more