Last Time | Next Time |
I think of these graphs as Facebooks you can have with a given number of individuals.
We drew all possible simple graphs (with unlabelled vertices) and with 3 or 4 vertices, discovering that there is a sort of duality in these graphs, too. Here are all the distinctly different simple graphs with four vertices.
I've assigned you a reading from The Joy of X by Steven Strogatz. Let's talk about is The Enemy of My Enemy (complete graphs, labelled graphs)
"...you can't see negative 4 cookies and you certainly can't eat them -- but you can think about them...." ("and you have to", says our author).
And the key to understanding stability in three-way social relationships is that the product of two interactions (signified by either +1 or -1) must be equal to the other: so that if two legs are positive, the third in the triangle must be positive; if one leg positive, and the other negative, then the third leg must be negative as well.
Strogatz sums up the second case above in the familiar saying that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend".
The following (two) graphs are unbalanced:
Finally Strogatz shows how historical relationships settled down into this pattern of stability: in "...the run-up to World War I. The diagram that follows shows the shifting alliances among Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary between 1872 and 1907."
The bottom right graph (complete!) is the only stable configuration, "...balanced, but on the brink of war."
Notice that Italy, which was not bothered by any of the powers of GB, F, or Ru, became a target -- because the friend of my enemy is my enemy, too:
How do we know that the final graph -- \(K_6\) -- is non-planar? (What does it contain?)
Today we're going to examine fractals in a couple of different contexts, and then talk about how to make a few.
In the latter two cases, you recall that by constructing spirals with squares in certain ways, we ultimately achieve (or tend to) a golden rectangle, which contains a perfect copy of itself (only smaller): the side lengths are in the ratio $\phi$, where \[ \phi=\frac{1+\sqrt{5}}{2} \approx 1.618 \]
Turns out, that if you do it over and over and over again, you'll still obtain rectangles that becomes more and more golden!
But that's because we were adding a square each time. Let's try another process....
"A paper" is something you've no doubt encountered before: it's the long sheets we occasionally use (usually "A4" paper), types of paper far more common in Europe.
"A paper" is constructed so that, if folded in half (do we say the long way or the short way?), you get a sheet which has exactly the same shape -- that is, the ratio of its side lengths is the same as the original sheet.
Let's see what the dimensions of A paper must be so that this requirement is fulfilled....
Call the long dimension of the A1 paper above $x$, and the short dimension 1.
Let's check: here are the "official" paper sizes (in mm):
Pick a height, and divide by the width, and what do you get? Approximately 1.4142.... E.g. A1: $841/594 \approx 1.4158$.
We could go on forever! There's "the world within the world". This is a fractal.
(By the way, the spiral image above has dimensions 424x300 -- the ratio? 1.4133333333333333....)
By which I mean that there's a perfect copy of the fractal contained, or embedded, within itself -- and perhaps infinitely many!
In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed, an apple tree; in cocoons, a hidden promise: butterflies will soon be free! In the cold and snow of winter there's a spring that waits to be, unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see. (In the bulb there is a flower)
For example, in the A0 Fractal, the whole rectangle (A0 paper) contains smaller (but perfect) copies of itself -- A1, A2, A3, .... papers.
This key notion is more formally called "self-similarity": "a self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself (i.e. the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts)."
This goes under the heading of recursion.
It turns out that nature loves fractals, just like it loves Fibonacci numbers.
I found this image in a recent issue of Nature:
This fractal becomes infinitely long, but in a confined space! Very strange.... but this type of strange behavior is typical of fractals.
Let's make a variation of that. Use your graph paper, and a stick along the short edge, that's 88 units long. Best to use a pencil with a good eraser! We'll want a stick that's 81 squares long (because we're dividing into thirds).
Instead of triangular tents, we'll make square tents.
The Chaos game - generating fractals using random movement!
One of the most interesting fractals arises from what Michael Barnsley has dubbed ``The Chaos Game'' [Barnsley]. The chaos game is played as follows. First pick three points at the vertices of a triangle (any triangle works---right, equilateral, isosceles, whatever). Color one of the vertices red, the second blue, and the third green.
Next, take a die and color two of the faces red, two blue, and two green. Now start with any point in the triangle. This point is the seed for the game. (Actually, the seed can be anywhere in the plane, even miles away from the triangle.) Then roll the die. Depending on what color comes up, move the seed half the distance to the appropriately colored vertex. That is, if red comes up, move the point half the distance to the red vertex. Now erase the original point and begin again, using the result of the previous roll as the seed for the next. That is, roll the die again and move the new point half the distance to the appropriately colored vertex, and then erase the starting point.
From randomness comes order; from simple rules comes complicated objects! Then all hell broke loose.
Because the above written pair in the first month bore, you will double it; there will be two pairs in one month. One of these, namely the first, bears in the second montth, and thus there are in the second month 3 pairs; of these in one month two are pregnant and in the third month 2 pairs of rabbits are born, and thus there are 5 pairs in the month; ...
there will be 144 pairs in this [the tenth] month; to these are added again the 89 pairs that are born in the eleventh month; there will be 233 pairs in this month.
To these are still added the 144 pairs that are born in the last month; there will be 377 pairs, and this many pairs are produced from the abovewritten pair in the mentioned place at the end of the one year.
You can indeed see in the margin how we operated, namely that we added the first number to the second, namely the 1 to the 2, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth and the fourth to the fifth, and thus one after another until we added the tenth to the eleventh, namely the 144 to the 233, and we had the abovewritten sum of rabbits, namely 377, and thus you can in order find it for an unending number of months.