Lambdia

Trigonometry

3 artículos

Volatilities Add Like Arrows, Not Like Numbers

Two stocks each swinging 20 percent a year with a correlation of one half give their product a volatility of 20 root 3, or 34.641 percent, rather than 40. Adding the two numbers is correct at exactly one correlation, namely 1, because the composite volatility is the law of cosines with the correlation as the cosine of the angle between two arrows. Pricing the call at 40 percent overstates it by 14.2 percent and ignoring the correlation understates it by 16.9 percent, and the other diagonal of the same parallelogram prices the ratio of the two stocks.

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Analysis / CalculusGradoExplicación9 min

A Lighthouse Beam That Sweeps the Shore at Pi Miles a Second

Differentiating y = L tan(wt) gives a spot speed of w R squared over L, so the footprint accelerates with the square of its distance from the lamp: a tenth of pi directly opposite, and exactly pi miles per second nine miles along. The 9 is the along-shore leg, which makes 90 the squared hypotenuse rather than the square of nine, and that misreading is the usual failure. Nothing physical moves at that speed, and a straight coast running 2310 miles would carry a nominally faster-than-light spot carrying no information at all.

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GeometryBachilleratoExplicación9 min

One Eighteen Inch Pizza Beats a Twelve and a Ten, by a Corner

The factor pi over four cancels off both sides, so the comparison is 324 against 244, about a third more pizza. Written that way it is the law of cosines: lay the three widths out as a triangle and the corner between the two smaller sides opens to 109.47 degrees, wider than square, which is the answer with no arithmetic at all.

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