Dogs and/or Calculus

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(Image credit: Flickr user Dean Jackson

Research more or less in, on, or about dogs and/or calculus
by Otto Didact, Improbable Research staff

The College Mathematics Journal published a series of studies by humans who were chewing at the question of whether and how dogs do calculus. Here are some significant items from that series.

Do
Do Dogs Know Calculus?” Timothy J. Pennings, The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 34, no. 3, May 2003, pp. 178-182.

(YouTube link)
 

Don’t
Dogs Don’t Need Calculus,” Michael Bolt and Daniel C. Isaksen, The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, January 2010, pp. 10-16. The authors implore:

Many optimization problems can be solved without resorting to calculus. This article develops a newvariational method for optimization that relies on inequalities. The method is illustrated by four examples, the last of which provides a completely algebraic solution to the problem of minimizing the time it takes a dog to retrieve a thrown ball, demonstrating that dogs don’t need calculus.
 

(Image credit: Flickr user Sebastian Sälzle)

Variations
“Do Dogs Know Calculus of Variations?” Leonid A. Dickey, The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 37, no. 1, January 2006, pp. 20-23

Bifurcations
Do Dogs Know Bifurcations?,” Roland Minton and Timothy J. Pennings, The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 38, no. 5, November 2007, pp. 356-361

Trammel?
“Do Dogs Know the Trammel of Archimedes?” Mark Schwartz, The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 42, no. 4, September 2011, pp. 299-308

Rates?
Do Dogs Know Related Rates Rather than Optimization?” Pierre Perruchet and Jorge Gallego, The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 37, no. 1, January 2006, pp. 16-19.

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The article above is from the July-August 2015 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

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Comments (0)

This guy really needs to go back in time and look at licensing. He's COMPLETELY off base on the reasons being tech related. He's comparing a betamax made in 1977/78 to a VHS made in 79. A year in tech does reduce weight. But big deal, you didn't carry the machine around.

The betamax died out in the mid 80's do to the same reasons MiniDisc, and 7" audio disks died. Sony kept the tech proprietary. The tapes, discs, whatever material had to be bought along with the machines, from Sony ALONE. At Sony's prices. Which are, even today, still at the top of the bar for consumer electronics. The VHS was licensed freely and had very strong competition driving down costs on both the machines and consumables along with raising competition for features on the machines. But Sony tech stagnated and did not continue to keep up with feature upgrades since they were not making the sales.

This simply a case of keeping too tight a hold and not having a strong enough brand to carry the price tag. Apple runs this risk as well. And, as competition increases giving other devices and OSes equal footing, Apple continues to loose market share. JUST LIKE Sony. It's simply a case of market econ.
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