Goodbye, Arthur C. Clarke

Since my blog is emblazoned with a quotation from the man it would be ungracious of me to let his death last week pass by without some remark. A man of formidable vision, Clarke envisaged the geosynchronous satellite years before anyone else, but was denied a patent because his disclosure of the idea in a Wireless World article was regarded as prior art. (How ridiculous this makes the US Patent Office's current lax diligence in the software field).

He was an inventive science fiction author, and one whose books would frequently withstand the test of a second and subsequent reading. Many were more prolific in volume, but few could challenge him on the scope of his ideas. In later life his move to Sri Lanka kept him in touch with the needs of the people increasingly crammed together on this small shared ball of rock.

Who knows where he ranges now. The world is a smaller place for his passing.

Image: Arthur C. Clarke Foundation

Close Enough?

I have long admired the formula often known as Euler's identity. It was probably known before Euler's time, but it is associated inextricably with his name because it is a special case of a more general formula, with π as the value of the bound variable. The identity asserts that


To me this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but I have long since given up trying to explain to other people why or how I perceive beauty in mathematics. Anyway I thought I would see how close my trusty laptop could get to emulating this mystic identity (it's amazing what I get up to when procrastinating), and naturally chose Python (though I believe the results would be just as disappointing in any other language). Here's what I got:

>>> math.e**(math.pi*-1j)
(-1-1.2246467991473532e-16j)


Definitely not quite the same mystical properties there, even though numerically quite close. No wonder I never liked applied mathematics!

Python Acknowledged at IEEE

The May/June edition of the prestigious Computing in Science and Engineering (CiSE) magazine is a single-subject issue on the topic of Python. This is surely a recognition of the language's value to scientists, and a vindication of the work put in by scientists all over the world to apply Python to scientific tasks.

CiSE is a joint publication of the IEEE Computer Society and the American Institute of Physics. Unfortunately not all articles are available electronically to non-members.