The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,392 posts.
A few posts back I was concerned with optimising the WiFi reception in my flat, and I chose a simple method for calculating the distribution of electromagnetic intensity. I casually mentioned that I really should be doing things more rigorously by solving the Helmholtz equation, but then didn't. Well, spurred on by a…
Are you kidding? Edward Barbeau is now a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Toronto. Over the years he has been working to increase the interest in mathematics in general, and e…
This page describes the errors that I have seen most frequently in undergraduate mathematics, the likely causes of those errors, and their remedies.
Notes will appear here. Please view in Chrome or Firefox. Chrome is glitchy, Firefox is stuttery. Work in progress. :/
Proposing technology for pure mathematics: curating concepts, constructs, theorems, & literature; precise symbolic language; automated computations...
<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…
A gentle introduction to backpropagation, a method of programming neural networks
This post is inspired by the “metacademy” suggestions for “leveling up your machine learning.” They make some halfway decent suggestions for beginners. The problem is, thes…
What is special about cylinders, and why do they have specific aspect ratios?
Sometimes taking the easy way out isn’t nearly as bad as it might seem! posted Thursday February 13th, 2014 Tagged: Math
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.
What is the largest volume cylinder it is possible to carve from a solid sphere? Also, so you know about the napkin ring problem?
A couple of Sundays ago, I wrote an implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm in Clojure. The core algorithm came to twenty-five lines. I banged out the code as...
Here’s an excerpt from Love and Math, a book by Edward Frenkel. The author writes about mathematics and his career. One of the stories is about …
If there is one highly underrated concept in philosophy today, it is computation . Why is it so important? Because computationalism is t...
This post is about an idea I had around 1997, when I was 16 years old and a freshman computer-science major at Cornell. Back then, I was extremely impressed by a research project called CLEVER, wh…
See also Frequentism and Bayesianism: A Python-driven Primer , a peer-reviewed article partially based on this content.
A tale of numbers that like to turn: a different look at complex numbers and the strange things they do.
It’s a huge surprise, and shows up in the most unlikely of places!
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…
During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald told the RAF to add armor where it didn't seem planes needed it. But he was right.
Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/categories-from-scratch.html. Alternate formats: Source, PDF. Prologue The concept of category from mathematics happens to be useful to computer programmers in many ways. Unfortunately, all “good” explanations of categories so far have…
