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Posts published by “Charles Beall”

The tricky mathematics of ice skating

One of the difficult aspects of mathematics is that it often scales poorly with the complexity of the problem. Math is great when there are relatively few variables and nice functions (for instance, continuous and differentiable functions) involved.

The Ising model: from electrons to elections

With the 2022 midterms being held on Tuesday, I wanted to write an article connecting mathematics to election modeling. What first came to mind was the statistics of polls and how predictions on election outcomes are made prior to the actual counting of the votes.

Getting on stage again

Yesterday will have marked my first time performing in an in-person Stevens Dramatic Society (SDS) show since my first year. It’s been a wild ride in between, with several virtual productions, and work last year as President and Producer for SDS.

Trick-or-treat with graph theory

Trick-or-treating was my favorite part of Halloween growing up. I loved to walk around, see other people’s costumes, and collect a hearty stock of candy to eat over the next few months.

The app sampler

I go back and forth on whether appetizer samplers are worthwhile at restaurants. On the one hand, it’s great having multiple apps to choose from to get a sense of what you like best.

Pendulum painting: a capriole with chaos

I was very excited earlier this week to receive a suggestion from one of my good friends about what to write for this column.

The last first month

The month of September flew by, and I didn’t realize until just now that it is the last first month I will have experienced as an undergraduate at Stevens.

The prisoner’s dilemma is not just about prisoners

Human interaction and decision-making are challenging to quantify. When we think about all the factors that play into a decision or encounter between groups of people—each person’s motivations, the amount of information each person holds, the cooperation between different people involved—the system quickly becomes a vast complex of inputs and outputs, with no clear function on how to get from one to the other.