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jonathan writes:

Ars Technica reports that in an effort to better understand, and possibly eradicate Wi-Fi dead zones, one man took the hard way by solving the Helmholtz equation for his flat (apartment).

The Helmholtz equation models "the propagation of electronic waves" that involves using a sparse matrix to help minimize the amount of calculation a computer has to do in order to figure out the paths and interferences of waves, in this case from a Wi-Fi router. The whole process is similar to how scattered granular material, like rice or salt, will form complex patterns on top of a speaker depending on where the sound waves are hitting the surfaces.