Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 20 posts.
There are two ways to teach quantum mechanics. The first way -- which for most physicists today is still the only way -- follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then you…
A tale of numbers that like to turn: a different look at complex numbers and the strange things they do.
People often ask me "What good is Relativity?" It is a commonplace to think of Relativity as an abstract and highly arcane mathematical theory that has no consequences for everyday life. This is in fact far from the truth.
The Fermi Paradox: There should be 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them?
Recently, there’s been a great deal of excitement and interest in deep neural networks because they’ve achieved breakthrough results in areas such as computer vision. 1
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
This article is now available in Japanese: 紙と鉛筆でビットコインをマイニング：1日に0.67ハッシュ and Russian: Майним Bitcoin с помощью бумаги и ручки . I decided...
Correlations are oft interpreted as evidence for causation; this is oft falsified; do causal graphs explain why this is so common, because the number of possible indirect paths greatly exceeds the direct paths necessary for useful manipulation?
Intel’s manuals for their x86/x64 processor clearly state that the fsin instruction (calculating the trigonometric sine) has a maximum error, in round-to-nearest mode, of one unit in the last place…
In terms of unreasonable effectiveness, the transformation to continuation-passing style (CPS) ranks with the Y combinator .
The Riemann zeta function $latex {\zeta(s)}&fg=000000$ is defined in the region $latex {\hbox{Re}(s)>1}&fg=000000$ by the absolutely convergent series $latex \displaystyle \zeta(s) = \su…
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/blog/images/acer.jpg"/> If you have a web site with a search function, you will rapidly realize that most mortals are terrible typists. Many searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work. This magic is often done using levenshtein distance. In…
Author’s note: this article used to be called “What Every ComputerProgrammer Should Know About Floating Point, part 1”. Some peoplenoted that this was perh...
I’m a (50%) professor of mathematics and (50%) professor of molecular & cell biology at UC Berkeley. There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with biologists and…
During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald told the RAF to add armor where it didn't seem planes needed it. But he was right.
Developers take garbage collection for granted, but it's hard to see how it works. Watch 5 different GC algorithm visualizations.
As a guest today in my daughter’s second-grade classroom, full of math-enthusiastic seven-and-eight-year-old girls, I led a mathematical investigation of graph coloring, chromatic numbers, ma…
"Emails show [Chris Cristie]'s aides did plan bridge gridlock," says Salon . To a transportation engineer, the aides are innocent: bridges can't have gridlock. While we often say "gridlock" to mean "bad traffic," it has a technical meaning.
