Simon Singh
speaker
239 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2013
last heard Jan 2015
Simon Singh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Something like that.
And pineapples have Fibonacci numbers embedded in their pattern.
They have eight spirals going in one direction and 13 spirals going in the other direction.
Eight and 13 are Fibonacci numbers.
But SpongeBob's pineapple does not have 8 and 13, so it doesn't obey that mathematical principle.
It's just an innumerate cartoon show with an impossible pineapple.
Yeah, we shouldn't expect all cartoons to have difficult maths embedded in them, but they should at least get the natural mathematics correct within them.
My number of the year is 22.
It relates to a problem called pancake sorting.
And pancake sorting is about imagining you have a stack of pancakes...
and they're of different sizes and they're in the wrong order and you want to get them into the right order by using a spatula.
You put your spatula in somewhere in the stack and you flip over some pancakes.
So let's imagine we only have one pancake that's bound to come in the right order.
So the pancake number for one pancake is zero.
Don't need any flips.
If you have two pancakes and they're in the wrong order, then the pancake number is one because you only need one flip to flip them both over.
So the pancake number for two pancakes is one.
Pancake number for three pancakes.
Turns out, if it comes in the worst possible order, you need three flips to do that.
And you can work out the pancake number for various numbers of pancakes.
Showing 161–180 of 239 · page 9 of 12
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