blinkdagger

Hello everyone, we have a brand new contest rolling over at Sol's blog wildaboutmath.com! It looks like he is changing up the prize a little bit, so it could prove quite interesting. The puzzle for this week looks to be a different flavor than anything we've presented so far, so please check it out!! If you decide to submit an answer, please state if you were referred by blinkdagger. We're trying to keep some simple logistics on how things are panning out.

In other news, the 2nd part of the fourier posts has been completed, so stay tuned for that. We will be posting that tomorrow morning. I know there are at least 3 people who are excited to see it. Click here if you missed the first one!

An interesting blog that we ran across the other day is called Data Mining in Matlab, which is run by Will Dwinnell. If you love Matlab as much as we do, you should pay it a visit. It has some nice content there. We are trying to get Will to guest post for us here at blinkdagger in the immediate future.

The first blinkdagger math contest has come to a conclusion and the winner is Joshua Zucker. He correctly deduced that the gold will be split when there are 512 Leprechauns left. Joshua is the director over at jrmathfestival.org and is looking for some participants. He is situated in the bay area (San Francisco, CA) and is looking for mathematicians interested in helping out at events and coming up with problems for the kids to work on.

We would like to thank everyone who participated in this challenge.There were many correct submissions, and some very interesting explanations as well. Daniel, Sol, and I are always interested in the thought process used in tackling these problems and we thoroughly enjoyed reading your submissions.

Some Monday Math Madness facts:

Number of submissions: 23
Number of correct submissions: 12 (so a little bit over 50%)

Continue Reading »

Introduction to Linear Time Invariant Systems

This is the first post in the blinkdagger signal processing series.

Fourier theory is predicated upon LTI (Linear Time Invariant) systems. Thus, before we even discuss signal processing, it is important to first understand what makes a particular system LTI. In this post, you will learn what classifies a system as LTI and why it plays a fundamental role in Fourier analysis.

There are three requirements for an LTI system which will be discussed in the following sections:

1. Scalability
2. Additivity
3. Time Invariant

We will see how each property affects the following block diagram:

Continue Reading »

Hey Everyone, today is the last day for you to submit answers to last week's math contest, which you can find here.

As stipulated in the rules, we will accept submissions up to until midnight of today (pst) and will announce the winner on Friday morning.

On another note:

We would like to announce that we are about to endeavor on a new series of tutorials that will focus on Fourier Theory and signal processing, so stay tuned for that!! These tutorials will feature a bunch of examples and will incorporate a ton of Matlab. In these posts, we'll discuss explain some of the theory,discuss important points, and best of all, we will be relating it all to Matlab. We are planning on posting the first post in the next couple of days. We don't know how many posts will be in this series, but we estimate it will probably run past 10 posts.

During the interim, we will try to continue presenting other Matlab tutorials if we get good ideas for tutorials that will be helpful.

We got meme'd by Sol at Wild About Math. So this is our 2x7 things about us you'd not likely guess. As for the monday math madness contest, we have received 13 submissions already. Keep them coming!

Quan:

1) I have Carrie Underwood wallpaper on my Desktop PC

2) It takes me 5 hours (or longer) to write a Matlab Tutorial.

3) My favorite food is pizza.

4) I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Mitchell from Lost. I think she is quite crafty.

5) I'm a huge dragonballz fan. I think I watched each episode at least 3 times. Go ahead and ask me a question, theres a 99.4% chance I will know the answer.

6) I check my email at least 15 times a day. Google analytics 4 times a day. Feedburner daily.

7) I enjoy watching sporting events from the comforts of my home rather than at the actual site. My favorite team is the Portland Trail Blazers.

Dan:

1. I was born in Indonesia, grew up in Taiwan, studying in the States. And no my last name is not Japanese. Although I have a little of Japanese blood.

2. I tend to eat a lot: rack up $160 value at all you can eat sushi buffet = eat 60 dumplings in one sitting = 12 giant pancakes (it was doughy in middle) in 20 min for a high school eating contest = wolf down 10 bowls (so small!) of rice at a restaurant = 5 bowls (big bowls!)of beef soup noodle = 2 $6 dollar burger, 2 chicken sandwich, and a famous star for a midnight snack (that didn't sit too well) = devour a whole duck along with 2 cups of rice

3. I love kids. I love babies (chubbier the better).

4. I like to solve problems and riddles. The more ways to solve it, the more interesting it is.

5. Although Quan is 30-40 lbs lighter, he bench presses 40-50 lbs more than me.

6. Use to play competitively in CAL for the game dota. Hit me up on dansensei.

7. Lined up for Xbox 360. Got two wii's on Jan 1st. Gave them all away.

We're tagging

David, Chanlee, and Katy

We would also like to tag Doug over at mathworks!