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Copy, Moon Joy
Carrying the torch from Apollo, through shuttle and station, to a hoped-for new era of space exploration, the Artemis 2 lunar flyby exceeded expectations All last week, I monitored the NASA mission coverage livestream. Within a few hours, as the crew approached the Moon (Luna), it waned from gibbous to half to crescent, as its…
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The Dream Is Alive
As a child of the Apollo program and a lifelong dreamer of spaceflight, I am thrilled to follow the Artemis 2 mission, carrying the first humans around the Moon (Luna) in over half a century, with the intent to pick up where we left off, establish a permanent lunar presence, and proceed to Mars and…
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A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes
100 years ago, physicist Robert Goddard designed and built the first liquid-fueled rocket. Powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen and launched from his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts on 1926 March 16, the first flight lasted 2.5 seconds and reached an altitude of 12.5 meters. 7 years earlier, in 1919, Goddard published the seminal…
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Guided Flame
Yuhe Ren, Niklas Manz, and I recently published an article Guided flame: reaction-diffusion of fire pulses in narrow channels in the journal Open Transport. Tim Siegenthaler helped machine the channels. This work had been gestating for a long time, but has recently became a hot topic. Fortunately, Yuhe was able to acquire all our data…
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Moon Trees
As command module pilot for the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, Stuart Roosa was one of 24 people to travel around the Moon* in the heroic first age of lunar exploration. He was also a former U.S. Forest Service smokejumper, and he carried into lunar orbit about 500 seeds to test the effects of spaceflight on…
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The Mathematics of Wonder
Since childhood I have been fascinated by M. C. Escher‘s extraordinary graphics. Escher once wrote, “I never feel quite at home among my artist colleagues; what they are striving for, first and foremost is “beauty” … I guess the thing I mainly strive after is wonder … .” In 1945 Escher produced a lithograph called…
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Chemical Wires
With Mahala Wanner and Gus Thomas, Niklas Manz and I recently published an article Chemical wires: reaction-diffusion waves as analogues of electron drift in the journal Transport Phenomena. Mahala began the work during our summer 2022 REU, and Gus continued it for his 2025 Senior IS. We used chemical reaction-diffusion waves in narrow channels to…
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e is Transcendental
Introduction The Euler-Napier-Bernoulli constant is not just irrational, it is transcendental, as first proved by Charles Hermite in 1873. Inspired by the work of Mathologer (Burkard Polster with Marty Ross), here I offer an elementary proof of ‘s transcendence. As warmup, I first present a well-known proof of its irrationality while hinting at the proof…
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My First Patent
In last month’s blog post, I described my second patent, which raises the question, What was my first patent? In 1998, my colleagues and I were issued United States Patent No. US 5 789 961 “Nose- and coupling-tuned signal processor with arrays of nonlinear elements”. The work began during my 1994-1995 sabbatical with the Applied…
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My Second Patent
Today, about six years after beginning the relevant research, my colleagues and I were issued United States Patent No. US 12 450 468 B2, “Physics augmented neural networks configured for operating in environments that mix order and chaos”. The work began during my 2019-2020 sabbatical at the Nonlinear Artificial Intelligence Lab at North Carolina State…
Author: John F. Lindner
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Nice post, John! Thanks for writing these. I always enjoy them.
David Smith’s ein stein is an awesome shape!
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Thanks, Mark! I enjoy reading your posts as well.