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How a Kalman filter works, in pictures
I have to tell you about the Kalman filter, because what it does is pretty damn amazing.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 22 posts.
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An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform (2012)
The Fourier Transform is one of the deepest insights ever made. Unfortunately, the meaning is buried within dense equations:
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Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. — Paul Graham, What You Can’t Sa…
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The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
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Seemingly impossible functional programs (2007)
Andrej has invited me to write about certain surprising functional programs. The first program, due to Ulrich Berger (1990), performs exhaustive search over the “ Cantor space ” of infinite sequences of binary digits. I have included references at the end. A weak form of exhaustive search amounts to checking whether…
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An interactive review of the Oklab perceptual color space
Blog of Raph Levien.
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Trapped priors as a basic problem of rationality
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
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How to learn mathematics: the asterisk method
All original material on the geometry.org website is Copyright (C) 1999–2025, Alan U. Kennington.
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Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams
Materials from our SIGGRAPH '20 paper.
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Speech to Birdsong Conversion
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
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The Inconsistency of Arithmetic (2011)
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…
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Functorio
You might have heard people say that functional programming is more academic, and real engineering is done in imperative style. I’m going to show you that real engineering is functional, and …
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Euler's Fizzbuzz (2020)
FizzBuzz is a common coding problem asked in technical screenings or interviews. It goes something like this:
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Sunset Geometry (2016)
Robert Vanderbei has written a beautiful series of articles and talks about a method for finding the radius of the earth based on a single photograph of a sunset over a large, calm lake.
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No, RSA Is Not Broken
I have been seeing this paper by cryptographer Peter Schnorr making the rounds: “Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms.” It describes a new factoring method, and its abstract ends with the provocative sentence: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem.” It does not. At best, it’s an improvement in factoring—and I’m not…
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