U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Taking Measure Blog Posts

Modeling and simulation research

Put exact phrase in quotes (e.g., "artificial intelligence")

Subscribe

Get Taking Measure blogs
delivered to your inbox.

GovDelivery
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11
Zach Levine in his kitchen wearing an orange and white striped apron and chef's hat

Minding your Peas and Carrots: Please Try This at Home

July 10, 2020
Ron Cowen
NIST physicist Zachary Levine doesn’t cook that often, but when he does it can easily turn into a science experiment. Two years ago, after he and his wife had endured a week of under-baked cookies and chicken that took forever to roast, Levine wasn’t content to simply recalibrate his oven according
white pi symbol on a grey field made up of the numbers of pi

The Life of (Buckingham) Pi

March 12, 2020
C.W. Clark
What do the following topics have in common? Pricing models for parking reservation systems. The mechanics of human walking. The die-down of water waves in sea ice. The self-hovering of unmanned aerial vehicles right above the ground. Bright cosmic infrared arcs that form when stellar dust meets the
Adam Pintar standing with arms crossed in front of a whiteboard covered with equations and graphs

One Statistical Paradigm to Rule Them All?

April 8, 2019
Adam Pintar
Now, if you’re familiar with either statistics or J.R.R. Tolkien, I know the title grabbed your attention. And if not, don’t worry, all will become clear in time, but I’ve always wanted to reference “The Lord of the Rings” in a title (and scientific papers provide little opportunity for that!)
stainless steel weights

Top NIST Images of 2018

February 6, 2019
Robin Materese
There’s nothing quite like a captivating image to make you want to learn more. And nowhere is that more apparent than when it comes to sometimes hard-to-understand science. Before we all get too settled into 2019, we thought we’d take a look back at some of our best pictures from 2018. If you missed
Mathematician Ryan Evans in front of a whiteboard covered in mathematical equations

It All Adds Up: Being a NIST NRC Postdoc in Applied Mathematics

August 21, 2018
Ryan Evans
I first learned about the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) while a graduate student in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware, which has an active student chapter of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). They regularly invite
Scott Glancy, a sandy blonde-haired Caucasian man with blue eyes, standing in his office wearing a black T-shirt that reads "Quantum physics: The Dreams Stuff is Made of

Local Realism, Bell’s Inequality, and T-Shirts: An Entangled Tale

April 26, 2018
Scott Glancy
For this past Christmas my wife, Rebecca, gave me a T-shirt that says "Quantum mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of." This is an allusion to the book The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of: The Most Astounding Papers of Quantum Physics— and How They Shook the Scientific World, edited by the late Stephen
Woman at blackboard

Plotting a Path from NASA Grids to NIST Graphics

April 27, 2017
Bonita Saunders
Before “Hidden Figures” was a movie, it was a book. Actually, two books—the regular book and a young readers’ edition. I liked the movie, but I loved the books. For many months, I watched the excitement surrounding the movie about three African-American women who made significant contributions to
Photo of purplish black sky with a streak of bright lightning

In Pursuit of Plasma Power: Hot Stuff, Snowstorms, and Starry Skies

September 15, 2016
Yuri Ralchenko
Do we really need hot stuff? I’m not talking about Donna Summer’s disco hit of 1979 or global warming. I’m not talking about anything so lukewarm as the surface of our sun—a mere 6,000 kelvins. I don’t even mean something as hot as 1,000,000 kelvins. No, the kind of hot stuff I’m talking about is
White balls in a row

A Slice of Math Functions for Pi Day

March 14, 2016
Sandy Ressler
Happy Pi Day! No, not pie day, Pi Day. That Greek character pi, π, that you’ve heard of but aren’t quite sure what the big deal is. Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. As yawn-inducing as that may sound, it’s an important ratio because pi is the same no matter the size of