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Sunday, November 25, 2012

An unexpected power law that relates site traffic to ranking by site traffic

How easy is it to estimate your number of site visits from site ranking and vice-versa?
Very easy: double the visits to halve the ranking.
I just blogged at upnaira.blogspot.com about finding the connection, and how rewarding to end up with such a neat graph:
Relationship between Alexa rank and monthly visitors
Here's the data I used:
Site %Traffic Reach Est. Monthly Visitors* Alexa rank
yahoo  20 1000000000 4
craigslist  1.5 75000000 42
meetup 0.2 10000000 465
nairaland 0.08 4000000 1385
jobberman 0.02 1000000 4653
cp-africa 0.004 200000 44206
wemabank  0.00028 14000 557445

*The monthly visitors numbers are estimated by assuming jobberman has 1million visitors per month (I think that corresponds to a ranking around 5k) and that the traffic reach percentage (data given by alexa for each site) is simply number of visitors for this site / a fixed number corresponding to all traffic.  That is, take the traffic to be proportional to the traffic reach percentage.

Well, who wants to do this experiment on a large scale?
Plot Global rank against Traffic-reach % or Traffic-Reach-estimate-of-Monthly-Visitors and see how well the data fit this law.
Alexa.com ranks at least 10million sites, so you could test with that many datapoints. 

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Saturday, November 24, 2012

Can you guess the movie titles?

You need to know a little math to figure these out!
Mathematical film titles: check below for some answers
I found another version at spikedmath:
Movie math Quiz: another version
Enjoy!
Do you have more?

Monday, November 5, 2012

A Summary of Mathematics

A lecture recently given at the University of Lagos was almost-verbatim published in The Guardian*.

In the paper titled Abstract Mathematics: Exploring the Universe through imaginative science , Prof. J.O. Olaleru gave a comprehensive layman's explanation of what mathematics and mathematicians care about these days - from number theory and topology to logic and even professional rewards: publications, prizes...
He said a bit about his own work and his beliefs as well.
Johnson Olajire Olaleru, PhD
Kindly download and read the paper:  Abstract Mathematics: Exploring the Universe through imaginative science .  It's a laudable example of maths in the public sphere.
Comments?

* ngrguardiannews.com , Part 1, Part 2

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