July 19, 1999

On this first day back from the weekend, the class started a little differently. First of all, Bob Panoff, or Bob1, led the activities in the morning, and secondly, today was devoted mostly to math rather than science. Bob1's lesson dealt with "The look and feel of zero." It explored how computers deal with very small numbers and the fact that at certain points it simply rounds to zero. For example, in one activity Bob1 used Microsoft Excel® to show when the computer recognizes a number isn't zero, but still treats it as if it was. In the spreadsheet, Bob set up tree cells formated to show 20 decimal places, in the first cell he put "1", in the second ".000000000000001" and the third was the sum of the first two. While the computer did recognize the very small number, when added to one it was lost and there was no sign that it had been added.

In the afternoon the students continued to look into math, not only in itself but also as a scientific aid. First, the class learned Newton's method of solving forth degree equations. The students also used excel again, but this time to linearize scientific data. The students primarily used the linear least squares fit method.