A harmonic series is a mathematical contraption that deals with cascading fractions. Like the Fibonacci series, I thought I could easily code a harmonic series in C — which I did, but not before reading up on the topic of divergence.
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My maths grades were horrible. I understand the concepts, but failed at solutions in class because I’d make silly mistakes. Computers make mistakes only when they’re programmed to do so, which means maths are far more enjoyable for me as a coder. For example, take the Fibonacci sequence.
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The Chicken McNuggets problem, presented in last week’s Lesson, shows code that outputs the highest McNuggets number from 1 to 100. This value isn’t a combination of 6, 9, or 20, the number of the pieces offered in the McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets packages.
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Chicken McNuggets come several to a box, depending on what you order: six pieces for a kid, nine pieces for an adult, or twenty pieces for an honest adult. These numbers in various combinations form what the math nerds call McNugget Numbers.
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Oh, how I distrusted recursion when I was a budding programmer. It’s just a tough concept to wrap your head around, especially if you’re an old warhorse Assembly programmer like me who lives in fear of blowing up the stack. Trivial asides aside, recursion often presents an elegant and efficient way to solve a programming puzzle.
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Like many other mathematical delights, the golden ratio pops up all over. It has a rich history, and a special Greek letter to represent it: φ phi. The value is irrational, meaning it cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers: 1.6180339…
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A long time ago, I looked at one of my prime number hunting programs, such as the one demonstrated in last week’s Lesson. I thought, “How can I make this program more efficient?” It’s something all programmers should do.
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Numbers with only two factors, one and themselves, are prime. One way to discover which numbers are prime in a computer program is to plow through all the factors.
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Prime numbers are a popular topic in computer programming. It surprised me that I hadn’t yet plumbed primes on this blog, so I’m past due. And forget about the nerdy aspect of prime numbers. Of all the concepts in mathematics, primes are something most people understand.
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The ctype functions are marvelous for single character manipulation and testing. Often, however, the functions appear in a loop so that they can be applied to an entire string. So why not write a string-based ctype function? Of course, that’s what I did.
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