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Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
What statistics can teach us about observing 3 deaths at Burning Man in 2026.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
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Reverse-engineering the Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
I hope you're not tired of the 8087, because I have another article about Intel's floating-point chip. 1 In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087...
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We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
[This is a guest post by Amit Sahai. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] When I was an undergraduate student, I remember talking with…
34
Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly
Having played both parts in the kabuki play that is employee-employer matchmaking, I feel the way we play it is a zero-sum game. I wish it were not so. When this post started life in 2024, as a wall of text chat message, it was brutal out there, on both sides of the software industry interview table. The ZIRP had…
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The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
[This is a guest post by the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] We would …
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Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?
[This is a guest post by Po-Shen Loh, crossposted from his blog, where an illustrated version appears. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. —…
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RSA-896
A post about RSA-896.
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If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
[This is a guest post by Grant Sanderson. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] A sentiment echoing throughout the mathematics communit…
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I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
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Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
[This post has been cross-posted to Terence Tao’s blog.] When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem stateme…
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Saving Jet Fuel
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Learning to solve hard problems in RL for LLMs by never giving up
This is a blog post for my recent paper on RL post-training of LLMs: introducing the Matthew Effect and proposing to solve it with Never Give Up. It is presented interactively and less formally, more like how I give the talk. For a deeper, more technical dive, check out the paper on arxiv and code on github. The…
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A beginning for mathematics
A positive vision for the future of mathematics: how our institutions can deepen human understanding as AI transforms mathematical research.
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After Math
[This is a guest post by Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Silvia De Toffoli (University School …
45
Compressing a flag to 11 bits
I recently saw an interesting YouTube video by “Physics for the Birds”. The main video is about matrixes, but he used flags to explain some of the operations on matrixes:
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A Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…
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The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem introduces an impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of …
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Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
Math as cultural institution.
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Can guitar frets perform multiplication?
I’m sure that some pictures are worth a thousand words, but others trigger a whole lot of puzzlement. Such was the case with the cover of a book I recently bought entitled Calculating with Tones: The Logarithmic Logic of Music:
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Poisson Disk Sampling
Stripe Across is a grog. We hope you enjoy it.
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Topologist's Map of the World
Reddit user xilefakamot created this in 2020 — a “topologist’s map of the world.” It depicts international borders and nothing else — the shapes, sizes, and distances between countries are forsaken in order to present the pattern of their borders as efficiently as possible. “No calculations per se – I sketched out a…
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Continuous Diffusion Language Models (CDLM's)
Fully discrete methods dominated for a few years, but language models based on continuous diffusion are making a comeback.
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No country for mediocre mathematicians
White lies of AI from a struggling geometer
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Hilariously fast volume computation with the divergence theorem (2018)
The following presents a fast algorithm for volume computation of a simple, closed, triangulated 3D mesh. This assumption is a consequence of the divergence theorem. Further extensions may generalise to other meshes as well, although that is presently out of scope.
55
PageRank explained
Picture this, the year is 1996. You find yourself frustrated with the incumbent search engines like AltaVista, which primarily does a content-based search (it'll give you an article on "Hotels for Chickens" if you search "Hotels" because the word matches). There's gotta be a better way, right? Well, in hindsight, of…
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One night in Uzbekistan: Why was this one data point so influential?
We have a comment coming out in Nature next week that is going to cause the retraction of a high-profile paper by Kotz et al. from last year (the second most cited climate paper in the news in 2024).
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Palomar: A registry of Lean verified mathematics
In recent months there has been a proliferation of AI-generated proofs of various old and new results, some of which have been formalized in the proof assistant language Lean. However, checking tha…
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A faster way to calculate the day of the week
A range of fast modulus techniques that beat compiler output
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AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
The key advantage may not be superior reasoning, but a virtually unlimited symbolic working memory.
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NP-overrated
If you learned about NP-hard problems in university, your takeaway was probably this: