What's that thing?
If you take a look at our class webpage, you might notice something that looks like a jumble of wires or something on the right - maybe, a bit like this:
The one on the webpage is smaller and oriented differently. It's also dynamic in the way it springs out on page load and it's interactive as it responds when you hover over certain parts.
The basic question is - what do you thing this thing is? More specifically,
- What do you think it might represent?
- What information does it contain?
- What could it possibly have to do with linear algebra?
This is really all for fun and motivation, by the way. There's no real reason you might know the details but it might be fun to think about.
Comments
What is it: I have no idea.
What it might be: some sorta dynamical system. If I had to take a guess it would be complex and linear. Complex, just because of a hunch about the many different pathways one thing can take. Linear cause it has a one to one route. Additionally I doesn't seem to be a bijection. The pathways are only one way.
What info does it contain. I think its a family of complex functions and it shows there behavior to pivot points or fixed points.
What it could possibly have to do with linear algebra: Maybe looking at a complex family of functions, as a matrix of coefficients, can lead to new ways of analysing a complex system.
This is all just a wild guess by a few things going on in this photo though.
Edit: (Spoiler Alert) I pressed tab on the homepage and the text gives some detail on what it might be.
@dan
I tried to give this both a "Good answer" vote and the "Not quite right vote", since I think either would be appropriate.
When you wrote:
I guess I'm not sure what you meant. Did you notice that you get information if you hover the mouse over a dot or edge?
@mark I used tab key to highlight selected links. Sometimes a webpage can have hidden links and information that is sometimes hidden when not using the tab shortcut. When I moused over it, I didn't get college games scores to pop up the first time; with the tab key I was able too. After going back to the image I was able to get the scores, if I hovered my mouse over. I seemed to just miss them the first time, so I thought it was a hidden piece of data on the page.
What it represents: It seems to me that this is a very... "interesting" way to display the teams of the college football Big Ten Conference.
As far as the information it contains, each of the 14 nodes is one of the Big Ten football teams. Hovering over one of the nodes reveals which team it is and also has loops connecting to other nodes. Note that each node has 9 loops that all connect to a different node. This represents the 9 teams that each team played within their conference that year. Hovering over the individual loop revels the final score of the game. Unfortunately I'm unsure of what the ranking, rating and index mean
I don't really have a clue as to how this could be related to linear algebra, but I think it would be interesting to learn of such a connection