Three Passions of Bertrand Russell (and a Collection of Free Texts)

in Literature, Math, Philosophy | January 31st, 2012

“Three pas­sions, sim­ple but over­whelm­ing­ly strong, have gov­erned my life,” wrote Bertrand Rus­sell in the pro­logue to his auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “the long­ing for love, the search for knowl­edge, and unbear­able pity for the suf­fer­ing of mankind.”

This five minute video, a pre­view of a three-part series pro­duced in 2005 for Ontario pub­lic tele­vi­sion called “The Three Pas­sions of Bertrand Rus­sell,” fea­tures a record­ing of Rus­sell read­ing pas­sages from the pro­logue, enti­tled “What I Have Lived For.” You can read the orig­i­nal text at the Bertrand Rus­sell Soci­ety, an excel­lent online resource, that also makes avail­able free books by Rus­sell, includ­ing:

You can also down­load the first edi­tion of Rus­sel­l’s land­mark 1910–13 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Alfred North White­head, Prin­cip­ia Math­e­mat­i­ca, as well as many of Rus­sel­l’s essays, includ­ing:

To explore the full list of avail­able resources, and to learn how you can sup­port the soci­ety’s activ­i­ties, vis­it the Bertrand Rus­sell Soci­ety web­site.

Also don’t miss some great Rus­sell mate­r­i­al in our own archives, includ­ing all six of his 1948 BBC Rei­th Lec­tures, a clip from a Cana­di­an tele­vi­sion inter­view fea­tur­ing his views on God, and his elo­quent 1959 mes­sage to the future.

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Incredible Mental Math Gymnastics on “Countdown”

in Math, Television | December 14th, 2011

Count­down is a British TV game show revolv­ing around words and num­bers. In the num­bers round, con­tes­tants select six of twen­ty-four shuf­fled tiles with num­bers on them. Next, a com­put­er gen­er­ates a ran­dom three-dig­it tar­get num­ber and the con­tes­tants have thir­ty sec­onds to get as close to that num­ber as pos­si­ble by com­bin­ing the six num­bers through addi­tion, sub­trac­tion, mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and divi­sion. This mem­o­rable episode of Count­down aired in March 1997 and starred James Mar­tin and his rather unusu­al way of arriv­ing at the tar­get num­ber of 952.

One YouTube user sug­gest­ed a dif­fer­ent way: 6 x 75 = 450; 450 ÷ 50 = 9; 100 + 3 = 103; 9 x 103 = 927; 927 + 25 = 952

I found yet anoth­er way: 100 + 3 = 103; 103 x 6 = 618; 618 x 75 = 46,350; 46,350 ÷ 50 = 927; 927 + 25 = 952

What about you? Any more sug­ges­tions?

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Math Cours­es

Math­e­mat­ics in Movies: Har­vard Prof Curates 150+ Scenes

Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion: The Vedic Way

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To Infinity and Beyond: A Mind-Bending Documentary from the BBC

in Math, Physics | November 29th, 2011

Infin­i­ty. It’s a puz­zling con­cept. Is it real, or a math­e­mat­i­cal fic­tion?

Aris­to­tle believed infin­i­ty could only be poten­tial, nev­er actu­al. To speak of an actu­al infin­i­ty, he argued, is to fall into log­i­cal con­tra­dic­tion: “The infi­nite turns out to be the con­trary of what it is said to be,” Aris­to­tle wrote in the Physics. “It is not what has noth­ing out­side it that is infi­nite, but what always has some­thing out­side it.”

Aris­totle’s log­ic rest­ed on com­mon sense: the belief that the whole is always greater than the part. But in the late 19th Cen­tu­ry, Georg Can­tor and Richard Dedekind turned com­mon sense upside down by demon­strat­ing that the part can be equal to the whole. Can­tor went on to show that there are many orders of infinity–indeed, an infin­i­ty of infini­ties.

But what rela­tion does the Pla­ton­ic realm of pure math­e­mat­ics have to the phys­i­cal world? Physics is an empir­i­cal sci­ence, but that has­n’t stopped the­o­rists from imag­in­ing the mind-bog­gling con­se­quences of an infi­nite uni­verse. To Infin­i­ty and Beyond, a one-hour BBC Hori­zon spe­cial fea­tur­ing inter­views with lead­ing math­e­mati­cians and physi­cists, is an enter­tain­ing explo­ration of a sub­ject which, by def­i­n­i­tion, you won’t be able to wrap your mind around.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge: 4 Bril­liant Math­e­mati­cians & Their Drift to Insan­i­ty

Futur­ist Arthur C. Clarke on Mandelbrot’s Frac­tals

Math­e­mat­ics in Movies: Har­vard Prof Curates 150+ Scenes

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Mathematics in Movies: Harvard Prof Curates 150+ Scenes

in Film, Math | November 23rd, 2011

Oliv­er Knill teach­es cal­cu­lus, lin­ear alge­bra and dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions at Har­vard, and, sev­er­al years back, he pulled togeth­er a fair­ly nifty col­lec­tion of Math­e­mat­ics Scenes in Movies. Over 150 films are rep­re­sent­ed here, every­thing from Good Will Hunt­ing, A Beau­ti­ful Mind, Juras­sic Park (above) to Alice in Won­der­land (1951), The Mal­tese Fal­con and Apoc­a­lypse Now. You can watch each scene in flash for­mat on Knil­l’s site, or down­load them as a quick­time file. And, math buffs, don’t miss our col­lec­tion of Free Online Math Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miss USA 2011: Should Schools Teach Evo­lu­tion? … or Math?

Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion: The Vedic Way

The Math Guy Radio Archive

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Visualizing Bach: Alexander Chen’s Impossible Harp

in Animation, Math, Music | November 8th, 2011

“Music,” Got­tfried Leib­niz famous­ly said, “is the plea­sure the human mind expe­ri­ences from count­ing with­out being aware that it is count­ing.” Com­put­er artist Alexan­der Chen makes this plea­sure vis­i­ble with Baroque.Me, his geo­met­ric com­put­er ani­ma­tion of the Pre­lude to Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s Cel­lo Suite No. 1 in G major.

Chen visu­al­ized the piece by imag­in­ing a harp with strings that would auto­mat­i­cal­ly morph into dif­fer­ent lengths accord­ing to the prin­ci­ples of Pythagore­an tun­ing. “It’s math based on the frac­tion 2/3,” writes Chen on his blog. “I start­ed with the longest string, set­ting it to a sym­bol­ic length of pix­els. When cut to 2/3 length, it goes up a fifth. Cut its length by 1/2 and it goes up an octave. 3/4 length, one fourth. From these sim­ple num­bers I cal­cu­lat­ed the rel­a­tive string lengths of all the notes in the piece.” He used eight strings because the Pre­lude’s phras­ing is in groups of eight notes. The strings are “plucked” by two sym­met­ri­cal pairs of nodes that revolve at a uni­form rate, rather like a dig­i­tal music box.

Chen, 30, lives in Brook­lyn, NY, and works in the Google Cre­ative Lab. One of his most pop­u­lar pieces for Google was the Les Paul Doo­dle, which allows users to dig­i­tal­ly strum the gui­tar strings. Chen grew up learn­ing music and com­put­er pro­gram­ming in par­al­lel. He plays the clas­si­cal vio­la, but with the Bach ani­ma­tion he want­ed to remove the per­former’s inter­pre­tive ele­ment from the music. “It’s a piece that I’ve heard a lot since I was a kid,” Chen told the BBC recent­ly. (See the “Math­e­mat­i­cal Music” pod­cast, Nov. 3.) “Peo­ple always bring dif­fer­ent lev­els of expres­sion to it. Peo­ple play to dif­fer­ent tem­pos and they add a lot of dynam­ics, or less dynam­ics. But what I want­ed to let the com­put­er do was just kind of to play in a real­ly neu­tral way, because what I real­ly want­ed to express was how much emo­tion and inten­si­ty is just in the data of the notes them­selves. I think that’s real­ly where the beau­ty of the piece at its core is.”

To hear the Pre­lude with the inter­pre­tive ele­ment back in, you can watch this video of Pablo Casals per­form­ing it in 1954:

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The Wonderful, Wooden Marble Adding Machine

in Math, Technology | November 4th, 2011

Cana­di­an soft­ware devel­op­er Matthias Wan­del enjoys spend­ing his spare time cre­at­ing wood­en con­trap­tions that com­bine a child­like sense of won­der with an engi­neer’s knowl­edge of mechan­ics. One of his most pop­u­lar cre­ations so far is this six-bit bina­ry adding machine, which has tal­lied near­ly one and a half mil­lion views on YouTube. As Rick Regan explains at Explor­ing Bina­ry, the machine func­tions like a low-tech inte­grat­ed cir­cuit. “It uses wood instead of sil­i­con, grav­i­ty instead of volt­age, and mar­bles instead of cur­rent,” he writes. “We don’t need no stinkin’ CMOS!”

The idea came to Wan­del after he noticed that one of his ear­li­er mar­ble machines incor­po­rat­ed log­ic-like ele­ments. “It had occurred to me,” he writes on his wood­work­ing site, “that per­haps with an insane amount of per­se­ver­ance, it might be pos­si­ble to build a whole com­put­er that runs on mar­bles.”  To illus­trate the point Wan­del built the adding machine, which stores the bina­ry states of six bits and can add num­bers from one to 63. The result may be more cool than prac­ti­cal, writes Regan, “but it cer­tain­ly is edu­ca­tion­al. It illus­trates basic prin­ci­ples of bina­ry num­bers, bina­ry arith­metic, and bina­ry log­ic.”

You can learn more about the machine on Wan­del’s Web page, and about the under­ly­ing log­ic and math­e­mat­ics at Explor­ing Bina­ry.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Calculus Lifesaver: A Free Online Course from Princeton

in Math | November 4th, 2011

It’s rare that we get to cov­er math here. So here it goes: Adri­an Ban­ner, a lec­tur­er at Prince­ton, has put togeth­er a lec­ture series (in video) that will help you mas­ter cal­cu­lus, a sub­ject that has tra­di­tion­al­ly frus­trat­ed many stu­dents. The 24 lec­tures (find them on Vimeo) were orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed as review ses­sions for Prince­ton intro­duc­to­ry cal­cu­lus cours­es offered in 2006, and each ses­sion runs about two hours. It’s worth not­ing that Ban­ner has used the lec­tures to devel­op a handy book, The Cal­cu­lus Life­saver: All the Tools You Need to Excel at Cal­cu­lus. To find this course (and many oth­ers like it), look in the Math sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 1500 Free Online Cours­es. Here you will also find Cal­cu­lus Revis­it­ed: Sin­gle Vari­able Cal­cu­lus, a vin­tage intro­duc­to­ry course filmed by MIT in 1970. Con­sid­er it a clas­sic…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math Mag­ic

Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion: The Vedic Way

Teach­ing Math with Doo­dling

Miss USA 2011: Should Schools Teach Evo­lu­tion? … or Math?

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Animations of 6 Famous Thought Experiments

in Animation, Math, Physics, Video - Science | October 18th, 2011

The Open Uni­ver­si­ty strikes again. In June, they released The His­to­ry of Eng­lish, a series of wit­ty ani­mat­ed videos that cov­ered 1600 years of lin­guis­tic his­to­ry in ten min­utes. Now, they’re back with 60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Thought, anoth­er ani­mat­ed sequence that high­lights six famous thought exper­i­ments. It all starts with Zeno’s ancient Para­dox of the Tor­toise and Achilles. (Watch above.) Then we head straight to the 20th cen­tu­ry, to five famous thought exper­i­ments in physics, math and com­put­er sci­ence.

The Grand­fa­ther Para­dox (time trav­el)

Chi­nese Room (arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence)

Hilbert’s Infi­nite Hotel (the con­cept of infin­i­ty)

The Twin Para­dox (spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty)

Schrödinger’s Cat (quan­tum mechan­ics)

You can watch the full series on YouTube and iTunes.

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