Author Archives: John F. Lindner

Recently, with members of NCSU’s Nonlinear Artificial Intelligence Lab, I completed a 3.5-year project as a subcontractor working on an industrial project. As an academic, this was a novel experience. Unlike most of my research, this work will no… Continue reading →

Caltech, Saturday night, grad student pizza. The conversation turns to a famous general relativity puzzle: does an electric charge at rest in a gravitational field radiate? According to Einstein’s equivalence principle, a static homogeneous gravi… Continue reading →

After the conference in Switzerland, I stopped in Tübingen to visit Otto Rössler. Nearly everyone who learned about nonlinear systems knows the nowadays named Rössler attractor and his work in chaos theory in the 1970s. For the last four years … … Continue reading →

As a kid, pouring over the Guinness Book of World Records, I was struck by the longest flight; instead of lasting hours, as I would have guessed, it lasted more than two months! Nearly 66 years later, it remains one … Continue reading → Continue reading →

When viewing space photography, such as Apollo or International Space Station photos, people often ask, “Where are the stars?” Typically such photos properly expose the relatively bright lunar or space station surfaces and consequently unde… Continue reading →

When searching for prime numbers, the next prime number is no larger than twice the current number. Postulated by Joseph Bertrand, first proved by Pafnuty Chebyshev, I present an elementary proof based on one by the teenage Paul Erdős. Erdős … Co… Continue reading →

Up early this morning to watch the spectacular fourth integrated flight test of SpaceX’s Superheavy Starship, the largest rocket ever built. Each IFT has greatly improved on the previous one, and the fourth was no exception. For the first time, &… Continue reading →

John Chase, the head of the Walter Johnson High School Math Department, in Maryland, near Washington DC, liked my Stegosaurus variation of the Spectre monotile so much that he had his students paint it on the wall of their math … Continue reading… Continue reading →

I still retain the personal, anecdotal memory of my first encounter with the spelling of people. I was learning to read, and I got cat, mat, pat. I got lot, pot, dot. But I did not get people. Why the o, and… Continue reading →

Thousands of years ago, ancient astronomers like Eratosthenes and Aristarchus combined careful observations with simple mathematics to measure the solar system, especially the diameters D of Earth, Luna (Earth’s moon), Sol (Earth’s star, th… Continue reading →