The opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” (The Endeavour)

The opening chord in Hard Day’s Night is an interesting problem. We just had it as a challenge problem in my Master’s Program in Applied Math. I am not completely convinced however that he found the notes played. There is a difference in what notes are played and what notes are heard. When you play a note on a guitar, you are not getting a single pitch. You get a bunch of overtones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone) as well.

After saying this, I should mention that I didn’t read the article or listen to the Mathematical Moments podcast. He might have a sane method of identifying overtones.

Finding embarrassing and unhelpful error messages (The Endeavour)

This is a really good idea. We should actually run a spellchecker on all our aspx pages at work as well instead of just strings in the code.

Mathematical genealogy (The Endeavour)

This is really cool. If you want, you can check out the genealogy of my adviser John Stockie.