By the time you are reading this Memorial Day will have just passed. As the unofficial start of summer, this holiday’s significance tends to get misplaced within the larger excitement of the end of the school year, graduation parties and celebrations, cookouts, the donning of culottes, shorts, and swimwear, and the mass migration to beaches everywhere. However, it would be decent and wise for all of us (whether we are wearing culottes or not) to reflect on the men and women who served this country and gave their lives so that we could be as invested in our own lives and our common pursuit of happiness. For these brave souls the pursuit stopped with death on the battlefield. Surely, as rich as we are, we can take some time to look with gratitude and charity upon those who died so we can live. God bless and keep them.
Now onto the columns.
This month’s Aristotle2Digital explores the basic tools that SymPy provides for query subexpressions within an expression tree. Along the way, the difference between mathematical equivalence and structural similarity comes more clearly into focus. The methods explored here are a steppingstone to implementing rules for term rewriting of existing expressions.
With the underlying statistical tools now in hand, this month’s CommonCents answers the question: how can one tell if a portfolio is really diversified versus just being a collection of various assets and equities? Since the key concept of diversification is the mitigation/reduction of risk the answer lies in finding financial instruments that are negative correlated with each other.
Up to now, heuristic arguments have been given for the existence of five equilibrium points within the dynamics of the circular restricted three body problem. This month’s UndertheHood elevates the argument from qualitative to quantitative showing how the critical points of the pseudopotential uniquely locate these equilibria – even if the path to three of them lies through a quintic equation.
Enjoy, remember, and pray.