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Ig Nobel Prizes awarded
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News
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By overconvergent
from the photography department
Posted Fri Oct 06, 2006 at 11:46:07 AM PDT
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The Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded for 2006. Unlike the real Nobel Prizes, there is a category for Mathematics, and it has been awarded this year ...
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| Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, have been awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for Mathematics for their research into how many photographs of a group of people one needs to take in order to get one photograph where everyone has their eyes open.
In their article, they give a formula for how many shots are needed; this can be simplified for groups of N people (where N is less than 20) to "take N/3 shots if the light is good and N/2 shots if the light is bad".
If there are about 30 people in a shot, one should expect to take about 30 photographs, and if there are more than about 50, then it is nearly impossible to get a picture with everyone's eyes open. |
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