Written by Thomas Stainer who likes to develop software for applications mainly in maths and physics, but also to solve everyday problems. Check out my GitHub page here.

Monty Hall meets Monte Carlomonte carloprobabilitymathsmonty hall

We’ve all heard the famous Monty Hall problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem), or at least, some variation of this. You…

A short post on mortgages and loan calculationsmortgageloanfinance

I always get annoyed when finacial products are sold to you without any explaination of how they come to these magical numbers. When you…

Prime unitsphysicsunits

Some ideas on a simple and elegant way to handle physical units and dimensionality when writing physics related software. I am yet to see a…

Englishman in Belgiumbelgiumenglish

I don’t drink coffee I take tea my dear… You know how the song goes. Well I am not an Englishman in New York, I am in fact an Englishman in…

The epic software controlling an accelerator near yousoftwarephysics

If you have ever built a particle accelerator before chances are you will know what EPICS is. If, however, like most people, you have not…

Birthday Monte Carlocode

Every so often the birthday problem comes up, whether it be in conversation, at a party, in the media, or overhearing on the train, I have…

Raspberry mathsrasberrypicost

I love raspberries but they are certainly not cheap. While it is not sustainable for me to eat them everyday, the occasional punnet is a…

Pypact IphysicsfispactFISPACT-II

I’d like to finally spend some time talking about one of my ongoing side projects - pypact. Whilst I have recently been pursuing a variety…

A Quantum Leap into HRHR

Below is a write up I did when I first started working for a HR start-up, which follows from my previous post. I thought my view on the…

My brief moment in HRtalkvideoHR

And now for something completely different. After spending a lot of my career in physics and mathematics, I thought why not try my hand at…

I don't like ifssoftwareSOLIDprogrammingconditional

The statement is fundamental to programming, a core tool in the arsenal of any developer existing today. Hell, I cannot even think of a…

Committed to commitgitcommitgithubfuture

I recently heard that prospective employers and recruiters have started looking at the GitHub commit panel (the green coloured squares on…

How to be a SOLID programmerSOLIDprinciplessoftware designC++

First entry of 2020 and it’s a very lazy one. But it points to non lazy content. A few slides and extensive examples (in C++) on SOLID…

Physics is like...Feynmananalogies

Physicists like analogies. It is a way to bridge the gap in knowledge, not only between those with ample background and those without, but…

Matplotlibing itmatplotlibplottingpythonROOT

When it comes to plotting with python Matplotlib is the de facto library and I must admit that I am an avid user of it. I wouldn’t call…

Linked list in Fortranfortranlinked listdata structures

Whilst I enjoy programming in Python and C++, it is envitable that I have to do some development work with Fortran for time to time. The…

List of tuples to two listspythontuplelistone liner

This is hands down my most useful python one liner, and I am embarrassed to say I have frequented the same Stack Overflow entry too many…

A refreshers guide to getting a Glastonbury ticketglastonburyticketsbotrefreshinatorfestivalselenium

Today is the one day a year when it seems perfectly normal to wake up early on a Sunday morning, boot up all available devices in your…

Refactor, Rewrite, or Retire?refactorrewritelegacynetscapegeant

I recently gave a talk at the Fourth Conference of Research Software Engineering (RSEConUK 2019) regarding options when dealing with legacy…

Killer commute revisitedcommutegoogleAPIpython

Back in March 2019, I posted a small entry on using Google directions APIs to determine the optimal commute time to and from work. The…

Random walk on a cubelinear algebra

Another interesting question I was was once asked in an interview situation, and one that has always stuck with me (it was about 8 years ago…

When a line meets a planegeometryplaneanglelinevector

This was always a nice problem to solve involving vectors and linear algebra. Given two points dictating the line and three points defining…

A great age and number too24string theoryRamanujanprime number

This post is about the number 24, my favourite number. Why? Well, not only was it a great age to be, it is also mathematically interesting…

Killer commutecommutegoogleAPIpython

Nobody likes traffic and congestion, especially me. My daily commute to work is a beast (small exaggeration). If I haven’t left for work…

Time for anglesmathsclockangle

I was once asked in an interview to calculate the angle between the minute and hour hands on a clock for the time 16:34. This was tricky to…

Mac your mac feel like new(ish)macSSD

Has your Mac become noticeably slower than when it was a shiny new machine fresh out of the box? Does switching it on feel like a steam…

Grossed outtaxincomeaccounting

In the UK we rarely speak about salaries, but in the situation when you’re negotiating a salary for a new role or a possible promotion, the…

The quadratic equationquadraticGCSE maths

The first mathematics related post, let’s keep it simple. Here we are going back to GCSE days. During my academic life I’ve dabbled in…

Reignite my blogging passionfatmontyphysicstomblog

My old blog fat monty, has been long retired and I felt a strong impetus to start a fresh reincarnation of it. So here I am again - new name…