In this article I will briefly explain radioactive decay and the concept of half-lives, and then go on to write Python code to illustrate the underlying mathematics.
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In this article I will briefly explain radioactive decay and the concept of half-lives, and then go on to write Python code to illustrate the underlying mathematics.
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In the first part of this article I wrote code to calculate rough estimates of square roots which enable formulas which converge on accurate square root values to do so with fewer iterations. Part 1 also included code to graph estimates to compare them to accurate values.
In this second part I'll implement some of those formulas, again graphing the results alongside definitive values.
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Python provides us with a perfectly satisfactory method of calculating square roots, the math.sqrt() method, but in this pair of articles I will explore some of the ways square roots can actually be calculated from scratch. In this first article I will look into a few ways of calculating rough estimates which form a starting point or "seed" for the methods I'll examine in Part 2.
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The International System of Units, commonly known as the SI System, consists of seven base units for measuring quantities such as mass, time and electric current. These base units can be combined into derived units to measure a wide range of other quantities.
In this article I will develop a Python class to represent base unit values and associated methods. In a future article I will extend the project to handle derived units.
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There is plenty of information around on Python's set data structure but it usually approaches the topic from a programming perspective. In this article I will look at Python sets from the mathematical point of view.
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On your travels round the internet you may have seen pieces of text with all but the first and last letters of each word jumbled up but still easily readable. If you are tempted to try jumbling up words yourself then read on - in this article I'll implement a simple program in Python to do just that.
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The Ancient Greek polymath Eratosthenes of Cyrene made the first serious attempt at calculating the size of the Earth. Using very simple observations and mathematics he achieved a surprisingly accurate result and in this article I will replicate his calculations in Python.
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Bacon's Cipher is a very simple and very old method of encoding a message and is now only of interest as a historical relic, but it also provides an interesting little programming project. In this article I will code it in Python.
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In this article I will demonstrate how to calculate the area of any quadrilateral, or four-sided figure, in Python using Bretschneider's Formula.
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