The tips of the sunset’s orange light begin caressing the beach sand, with a soft mist in tow. The mist grows denser, soon enveloping the shoreline and adjacent palm trees. A dark shadow rises, growing larger and larger, as if something were approaching the shore, however it is impossible to judge the distance due to
With American election season in full swing, at least as I write this (February 1st, 2024), I thought it might be appropriate to write about Benford’s law, how it has been used in the past to analyze numbers, why it has been used to search for election fraud, and, importantly, when it is inappropriate to
Game Theory is a branch of mathematics which economists happen to find very useful. The reason is that Game Theory concerns itself with situations involving some type of competition, or “games,” where players can make moves independent of one another. This setup is analogous to companies, the players, competing for customers, and whichever can gain
The logic problem goes as follows: ” There are one hundred prisoners, each numbered one through one hundred. In an adjacent room, there are 100 boxes, also numbered one through one hundred. Each box holds a slip of paper, also numbered one through one hundred however each slip of paper is randomly inserted into each
For this post I will be showing you how to build a dice rolling simulator and, more largely, how to calculate then simulate problems known as “coupon collector” problems, all using Excel and VBA. Starting off with the question, how many rolls of a die would you expect to need in order to roll all six sides
All things will begin with the sigmoid function. Or rather a sigmoid function, as it is a generic term. But it is a function that is bounded between 0 and 1 and is therefore really useful to model binary probability, because an event either happens or doesn’t: you live or die, win or lose, get
So, you want to run a linear regression in Excel. Maybe you need to do some forecasting, maybe you want to tease out a relationship between two (or more) variables. Maybe you have to explain some phenomenon and predict it, but you don’t have a clue how it works or why it does what it
This is my take on the Toads and Frogs logic puzzle. Instead of Frogs and Toads however, I will be using one of my favorite animals, the mighty ostrich. “Three pink ostriches are heading south to get home and run into three blue ostriches on a very narrow path in the savanna. The three blue ostriches are also heading home but their
This time we’re looking at something called the Josephus problem. As far as I can tell this is based off of an actual event in history or is at least attributed to a historical figure, Titus Flavius Josephus. Here is the basic set up: Josephus and 40 other of his fellow Jewish soldiers are surrounded and will
Posted by Rik Leja | Wednesday, 11 July, 2018 | No Comments For this project I decided to create an interactive world map in Excel treating each cell as a pixel and carving out the natural and political borders of territories, countries, and islands using colors and cell borders to differentiate the areas. My finished map looks like this: A few