Back when I was working at the University of Waterloo, I found several copies of a VHS tape sitting on a dusty bookshelf full of old Maple boxes and manuals. The tape's cover had a line drawing of Issac Newton on it and the title "Maple V: The Future of Mathematics".

There was...

I was recently asked a question on using regular expressions with ?type , and I thought it was interesting enough, to share here.

This year I am organizing East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD) 2011 at the University of Waterloo, on April 9th. 

ECCAD is a long running series of annual one-day meetings for those interested in...

The Canadian Lotto649 draws are randomized the old fashioned way, the draws are held using a Ryo-Catteau Tulipe ball machine made by a well respected French Company. The draws are video recorded in a secure studio, and broadcast live.  There is no reason to suspect that these draws might not be random, but let us look at some ways we might detect it if it were not random.

You could look at the Lottery draws as a generator for a binary sequence as I did in my previous post, but as Robert Israel pointed out in the comments, that encoding can hide some non-random behavior (e.g. if the number 25 appeared in every draw, that encoding would not appear less random).

This is not really the next part in my randomness series, but more of an aside.  I used Maple's embedded components to use the Lotto649 drawing data from my last post to create a historical lottery simulator.  Basically, you fill in your prefered numbers, and it simulates you playing the lottery in every draw since 1982.