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Sunset Geometry (2016)
Dec 2016 Robert Vanderbei has written a beautiful series of articles and talks about a method for finding the radius of the earth based on a single photograph of a sunset over a large, calm lake. Vanderbei’s analysis is an elegant and subtle exercise in classical trigonometry.
12 Dec 2016 Robert Vanderbei has written a beautifulseries of articles and talks about a method for finding the radius of the earth based on a single photograph of a sunset over a large, calm lake. This counterintuitive fact occurs because the exact form suffers from “catastrophic cancellation,” the result of subtracting approximately equal values that have been computed with rounding error. The main deficiencies of complex numbers are that they don’t extend well to three or more dimensions, and that they single out the real axis as a special direction in the plane in a way that isn’t appropriate to problems with rotational symmetry.
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