the center of the world (was Re: Check out O'Reilly's Open Source Convention Highlights)

Konrad Hinsen hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr
Fri Jun 29 09:08:29 EDT 2001


"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:

> to 'population centers'.  Of course I could get different
> centers by choosing different weighing factors (country GNP
> rather than country population, for example).

Or by Python expertise ;-)

> Hmmm, if the coordinates were on a plane, finding the weighed center
> would be trivial, but offhand I can't think of how to do it on a
> sphere's surface -- I guess there must be some way more suitable
> than just solving a generalized extremization problem -- can anybody
> suggest one...?

What's so bad about it? Searching for a global minimum in two
variables is not so difficult. All the more within finite coordinate
intervals. Of course there might be no global minimum at all.

Konrad.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr
Centre de Biophysique Moleculaire (CNRS) | Tel.: +33-2.38.25.56.24
Rue Charles Sadron                       | Fax:  +33-2.38.63.15.17
45071 Orleans Cedex 2                    | Deutsch/Esperanto/English/
France                                   | Nederlands/Francais
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------



More information about the Python-list mailing list