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99 Bottles Of Beer
"99 Bottles of Beer" or "100 Bottles of Pop on the Wall" is a song dating to the mid-20th century. It is a traditional reverse counting song in both the United States and Canada. It is popular to sing on road trips, as it has a very repetitive format which is easy to memorize and can take a long time when families sing. In particular, the song is often sung by children on long school bus trips, such as class field trips, or on Scout or Girl Guide outings. Lyrics The song's lyrics are as follows, with mathematical values substituted: (n) bottles of beer on the wall. (n) bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, (n-1) bottles of beer on the wall. (caution: this mathematical formula ends with n=1, the song does not use negative numbers). Alternative line: If one of those bottles should happen to fall, 98 bottles of beer on the wall... The same verse is repeated, each time with one bottle fewer, until there is none left. Variations on the last verse following the la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Counting
Counting is the process of determining the number of elements of a finite set of objects, i.e., determining the size of a set. The traditional way of counting consists of continually increasing a (mental or spoken) counter by a unit for every element of the set, in some order, while marking (or displacing) those elements to avoid visiting the same element more than once, until no unmarked elements are left; if the counter was set to one after the first object, the value after visiting the final object gives the desired number of elements. The related term '' enumeration'' refers to uniquely identifying the elements of a finite (combinatorial) set or infinite set by assigning a number to each element. Counting sometimes involves numbers other than one; for example, when counting money, counting out change, "counting by twos" (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, ...), or "counting by fives" (5, 10, 15, 20, 25, ...). There is archaeological evidence suggesting that humans have been count ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uncountable Set
In mathematics, an uncountable set (or uncountably infinite set) is an infinite set that contains too many elements to be countable. The uncountability of a set is closely related to its cardinal number: a set is uncountable if its cardinal number is larger than that of the set of all natural numbers. Characterizations There are many equivalent characterizations of uncountability. A set ''X'' is uncountable if and only if any of the following conditions hold: * There is no injective function (hence no bijection) from ''X'' to the set of natural numbers. * ''X'' is nonempty and for every ω-sequence of elements of ''X'', there exists at least one element of X not included in it. That is, ''X'' is nonempty and there is no surjective function from the natural numbers to ''X''. * The cardinality of ''X'' is neither finite nor equal to \aleph_0 ( aleph-null, the cardinality of the natural numbers). * The set ''X'' has cardinality strictly greater than \aleph_0. The first th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Complexity Of Songs
"The Complexity of Songs" is a scholarly article by computer scientist Donald Knuth in 1977, as an in-joke about computational complexity theory. The article capitalizes on the tendency of popular songs to devolve from long and content-rich ballads to highly repetitive texts with little or no meaningful content.Steven Krantz (2005) "Mathematical Apocrypha Redux", , pp.2, 3. The article notes that a song of length ''N'' words may be produced remembering, e.g., only words ("space complexity" of the song). Article summary Knuth writes that "our ancient ancestors invented the concept of refrain" to reduce the space complexity of songs, which becomes crucial when a large number of songs is to be committed to one's memory. Knuth's Lemma 1 states that if ''N'' is the length of a song, then the refrain decreases the song complexity to ''cN'', where the factor ''c'' < 1. Reprinted in: Knuth further demonstrates a way of producing songs with [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
In-joke
An in-joke, also known as an inside joke or a private joke, is a joke whose humour is understandable only to members of an ingroup; that is, people who are ''in'' a particular social group, occupation, or other community of shared interest. It is, therefore, an esoteric joke, only humorous to those who are aware of the circumstances behind it. In-jokes may exist within a small social clique, such as a group of friends, or extend to an entire profession or other relatively large group. An example is: ::Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice? ::A: Zorn's lemon. Individuals not familiar with the mathematical result Zorn's lemma are unlikely to understand the joke. The joke is a pun on the name of this result. Ethnic or religious groups may also have in-jokes. Philosophy In-jokes are cryptic allusions to shared common ground that act as selective triggers; only those who share that common ground are able to respond appropriately. An in-joke can work to build c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time Complexity
In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by the algorithm, supposing that each elementary operation takes a fixed amount of time to perform. Thus, the amount of time taken and the number of elementary operations performed by the algorithm are taken to be related by a constant factor. Since an algorithm's running time may vary among different inputs of the same size, one commonly considers the worst-case time complexity, which is the maximum amount of time required for inputs of a given size. Less common, and usually specified explicitly, is the average-case complexity, which is the average of the time taken on inputs of a given size (this makes sense because there are only a finite number of possible inputs of a given size). In both cases, the time complexity is generally expresse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms". He is the author of the multi-volume work ''The Art of Computer Programming'' and contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process, he also popularized the asymptotic notation. In addition to fundamental contributions in several branches of theoretical computer science, Knuth is the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, the related METAFONT font definition language and rendering system, and the Computer Modern family of typefaces. As a writer and scholar, Knuth created the WEB and CWEB computer programming systems designed to encou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (although there is overlap). Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on specific areas (such as algorithm and data structure development and design, software engineering, information theory, database theory, computational complexity theory, numerical analysis, programming language theory, computer graphics, and computer vision), their foundation is the theoretical study of computing from which these other fields derive. A primary goal of computer scientists is to develop or validate models, often mathematical, to describe the properties of computational systems (processors, programs, computers interacting with people, computers interacting with other computers, etc.) with an overall objective of discovering d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Continuum Hypothesis
In mathematics, the continuum hypothesis (abbreviated CH) is a hypothesis about the possible sizes of infinite sets. It states that or equivalently, that In Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC), this is equivalent to the following equation in aleph numbers: 2^=\aleph_1, or even shorter with beth numbers: \beth_1 = \aleph_1. The continuum hypothesis was advanced by Georg Cantor in 1878, and establishing its truth or falsehood is the first of Hilbert's 23 problems presented in 1900. The answer to this problem is independent of ZFC, so that either the continuum hypothesis or its negation can be added as an axiom to ZFC set theory, with the resulting theory being consistent if and only if ZFC is consistent. This independence was proved in 1963 by Paul Cohen, complementing earlier work by Kurt Gödel in 1940. The name of the hypothesis comes from the term '' the continuum'' for the real numbers. History Cantor believed the continuum hypothesis t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fibonacci Number
In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted , form a sequence, the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. The sequence commonly starts from 0 and 1, although some authors start the sequence from 1 and 1 or sometimes (as did Fibonacci) from 1 and 2. Starting from 0 and 1, the first few values in the sequence are: :0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144. The Fibonacci numbers were first described in Indian mathematics, as early as 200 BC in work by Pingala on enumerating possible patterns of Sanskrit poetry formed from syllables of two lengths. They are named after the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, later known as Fibonacci, who introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics in his 1202 book '' Liber Abaci''. Fibonacci numbers appear unexpectedly often in mathematics, so much so that there is an entire journal dedicated to their study, the '' Fibonacci Quarterly''. Applications of Fibonacci numbers includ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantor Set
In mathematics, the Cantor set is a set of points lying on a single line segment that has a number of unintuitive properties. It was discovered in 1874 by Henry John Stephen Smith and introduced by German mathematician Georg Cantor in 1883. Through consideration of this set, Cantor and others helped lay the foundations of modern point-set topology. The most common construction is the Cantor ternary set, built by removing the middle third of a line segment and then repeating the process with the remaining shorter segments. Cantor mentioned the ternary construction only in passing, as an example of a more general idea, that of a perfect set that is nowhere dense. More generally, in topology, ''a'' Cantor space is a topological space homeomorphic to the Cantor ternary set (equipped with its subspace topology). By a theorem of Brouwer, this is equivalent to being perfect nonempty, compact metrizable and zero dimensional. Construction and formula of the ternary set The Cantor t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Summation
In mathematics, summation is the addition of a sequence of any kind of numbers, called ''addends'' or ''summands''; the result is their ''sum'' or ''total''. Beside numbers, other types of values can be summed as well: functions, vectors, matrices, polynomials and, in general, elements of any type of mathematical objects on which an operation denoted "+" is defined. Summations of infinite sequences are called series. They involve the concept of limit, and are not considered in this article. The summation of an explicit sequence is denoted as a succession of additions. For example, summation of is denoted , and results in 9, that is, . Because addition is associative and commutative, there is no need of parentheses, and the result is the same irrespective of the order of the summands. Summation of a sequence of only one element results in this element itself. Summation of an empty sequence (a sequence with no elements), by convention, results in 0. Very often, the elem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Complex Number
In mathematics, a complex number is an element of a number system that extends the real numbers with a specific element denoted , called the imaginary unit and satisfying the equation i^= -1; every complex number can be expressed in the form a + bi, where and are real numbers. Because no real number satisfies the above equation, was called an imaginary number by René Descartes. For the complex number a+bi, is called the , and is called the . The set of complex numbers is denoted by either of the symbols \mathbb C or . Despite the historical nomenclature "imaginary", complex numbers are regarded in the mathematical sciences as just as "real" as the real numbers and are fundamental in many aspects of the scientific description of the natural world. Complex numbers allow solutions to all polynomial equations, even those that have no solutions in real numbers. More precisely, the fundamental theorem of algebra asserts that every non-constant polynomial equation with rea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
