"You realize, Baron Melchester, that on this hand rides the fate of Prussia, Poland and The Low Countries? Not to mention a one month loan of your butler, Grimes..."
Daze of Our Lives

Richard II’s Preferred Blancmange Recipe

November 16th, 2009 at 8:41 pm (Afternoon Tea)

This page, showing a recipe for Blancmange (Blank maunger), is from Fourme of Curye, compiled by master cooks to king Richard II of England, part of the Medieval Collection at the library of John Rylands University, Manchester.

blancmange-recipe

Original BBC story located here.

Blancmange Function

February 28th, 2008 at 11:26 pm (Afternoon Tea)

The Blancmange function, also called the Takagi fractal curve (Peitgen and Saupe 1988), is a pathological continuous function which is nowhere differentiable. The iterations towards the continuous function are batrachions resembling the Hofstadter-Conway $10,000 sequence. The first six iterations are illustrated below. The dth iteration contains N+1 points, where N=2d, and can be obtained by setting b(0)=b(N)=0, letting

b(m+2(n-1))=2n+1/2[b(m)+b(m+2n)],

and looping over n=d to 1 by steps of -1 and m=0 to N-1 by steps of 2n.