Clustering Scotch Whiskies using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization
I happened upon this article while sipping one of my all time favorite single-malt Scotchs: The Laphroaig 10 Year, a wonderfully peaty selection from Islay. It describes how Singular Value Decomposition can be used as a form of matrix factorization to help cluster Scotch-Whiskies based on several “flavor”-metrics. Each […]

Alcohol Breath Testing and Least Squares Data Fitting
The above link is to a study at North Carolina State University investigating the mathematics behind how breathalyser tests calculate a persons Blood Alcohol Content (BAC). It turns out (not surprisingly) that if a person takes several breathalyser tests one after another, their results can vary […]

CBS’s primetime show “Numb3ers” is the story of 2 brothers, one a hardened FBI agent the other a world-renowned mathematician, who use a combination of brawn and smarts to solve crimes. In an episodde from the first season (Episode Information, Information about the Math of Numb3ers) some bad-guys make some counterfeit money and the […]