Author Archives: gmcdavid

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About gmcdavid

Retired IT professional with a wide range of interests. Married. Three sons, two with autistic-spectrum disorders and the third being transgender with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. From Chicago but now living in the Twin Cities metro, Minnesota. Episcopalian. Carleton College (BA 1972, physics) and Stanford University (MS 1974, Applied Physics; MS 1976 Statistics).

Taxes

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I thought I should take at least a first look at taxes while it was still March, so I installed the copy of TurboTax that had been sitting on my desk for several weeks. I then went ahead and did most of the data entry. 2007 was quite a chaotic year for our tax situation so I had no idea what to expect. It now looks like we be getting a refund of well over $1000, but four hours ago I would not have been surprised to see a similar figure in the other direction.

We still have a few more things to enter into the system, but they all work in our favor. I think I have accounted for everything that could bite us.

Math on the bus

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After a long pause I have been reading more in Julian Havil’s Gamma, which I mentioned a couple months ago.

On the bus going home tonight I worked through Euler’s original solution of the Basel problem. I was just stunned by how clever that was.

This original solution was somewhat lacking in mathematical rigor–more like the sort of thing a physicist would do :-)> So I appreciated it all the more. Euler later went back and produced a rigorous version.