“Chaos, Fractals and Not So Random Numbers”

We started off our autumn series of talks with a very well attended and much appreciated talk on “Chaos, Fractals and Not So Random Numbers” from Dr Martin Lavelle.

Martin has provided these links which reference various topics he covered in his talk

Spurious correlations
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Benford’s Law
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-benfords-law-why-this-unexpected-pattern-of-numbers-is-everywhere/

Simpson’s Paradox
https://towardsdatascience.com/the-curious-case-of-simpsons-paradox-6f178548d7e8/

NASA eclipse page
https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html

Chaos
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maths/introduction-to-chaos-theory/

A list of some applications of chaos theory
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maths/applications-of-chaos-theory/

If you would like to make your own chaotic pendula, here is a video about how to do it. If anyone does this, please send us a video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=615GTw4TNxI

Fractals

https://nrich.maths.org/problems/von-koch-curve

A deep dive (video) into the von Koch snowflake

https://www.fractalset.com/mandelbrot/gallery

A dive into the Mandelbrot set

https://www.fractalset.com/mandelbrot/gallery

A few named areas of the Mandelbrot set
https://www.fractalset.com/mandelbrot/gallery

A list of some applications of fractals
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maths/real-life-applications-of-fractals/

From the Q&A

The Science of Shuffling: Techniques and Their Effect on Gameplay https://pokercallers.com/the-science-of-shuffling-techniques-and-their-effect-on-gameplay

Research on throwing dice https://www.aip.org/inside-science/dice-rolls-are-not-completely-random

Innumeracy book