Dave Richeson

Dec 8, 2024 | divisbyzero.com | Dave Richeson

I’ve been on a weird kick lately making images using Excel. [Here’s one post. I hope to post more soon.] If you add a background color to each cell in a spreadsheet and resize the cell widths to make each one square, then you can zoom out so that each cell acts like a pixel in an image. In this post, I show how you can create your own “Magic Eye” image using Excel. (I also give you an Excel spreadsheet to get you started.) Technically these images are called autostereograms.

Feb 16, 2024 | quantamagazine.org | Thomas Lin |Thomas LinEditor |Pradeep Mutalik |Dave Richeson

It’s the year 2718. Humanity has invented a warp drive that enables a spacecraft to hyperjump to distant solar systems and back to Earth. The drive promises to revolutionize space exploration. But there’s a catch. The new technology can only make hyperjumps that follow the basic rules of arithmetic. Earth’s governing body has tapped you, an adventurous math explorer, to captain the first warp-drive-equipped starship in its fleet.

May 8, 2023 | divisbyzero.com | Dave Richeson

Recently one of my colleagues was reading Alan Turing‘s groundbreaking 1936 article “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This is the article in which Turing introduced the turing machine, solved Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem (`decision problem’), and proved that the halting problem is undecidable. It is viewed by many as the foundation of computer science. My colleague shared it with me because it contains a neat use of topology.