The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
A recent Twitter thread brought home to me that there is widespread confusion about what types actually are, even among the most prominent researchers. In particular: are types the same thing as sets ? At the risk of repeating some of my prior posts, perhaps it’s time for a little history about type theory, set theory…
Chess puzzles, but you are what you eat.
This post is an offshoot from Chapter 1 of Probably Overthinking It, which is available for pre-order now! Suppose you measure the arm and leg lengths of 4082 people. You would expect those measurements to be correlated, and you would be right. In the ANSUR-II dataset, among male members of the armed forces, this…
In this post I derive the physics of pumping a swing and the physics of jumping from a swing. Then, using both pieces I compute the optimal strategy of jumping from a swing to maximize the traveled distance. I propose this game as a new Olympic sport.
Presently into the 100th year of his life of vast experience, living in his Buffalo residence, here is a video message communicated by his daughter when he turned 99, at the beginning of a year-long celebration, with conferences in his honour at various places.
Thoughts about what worked in math circles After about 7 months of math circles with a group of 7- turning 8-year-old boys and girls, I decided to take a...
Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, math, art, demoscene, shaders and more.
Many years ago I've re-posted a Stack Overflow answer with Python code for a terse prime sieve function that generates a potentially infinite sequence of prime numbers ("potentially" because it will run out of memory eventually). Since then, I've used this code many times - mostly because it's short and clear. In this…
Great. The fusion hype is bad enough already. Now its resurgence is going to interrupt the series of posts I’m in the middle of publishing in order for this post to be “timely.”
When NP-hardness pops up on the internet, say because some silly blogger wants to write about video games, it’s often tempting to conclude that the problem being proved NP-hard is actually very hard! “Scientists proved Super Mario is NP-hard? I always knew there was a reason I wasn’t very good at it!” Sorry, these two…
Open-source research project that explores the design space of binary search trees to implement persistent and concurrent linear list data structures.
The following is based upon systems of equations found in "Symmetry in Chaos, A Search for Pattern in Mathematics, Art, and Nature" (the second edition) by Michael Field and Martin Golubitsky. They ask the question whether there are aperiodic chaotic attractors that generate symmetric patterns? Can there be order…
Fastest general and simple binary search C++ implementation
An interactive introduction to grokking and mechanistic interpretability.
Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder . Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it's creative coding and simulated cities , code poetry and bulletin board systems . It's websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart…
Minimalist 3D Tetris.
The Enrichment side of the "Accelerate vs Enrich" dichotomy in math education for kids who love math.
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 15260. Homepage: www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page is available at www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/goodies
An interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and medical scientists have uncovered an unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics.
This summer, 3Blue1Brown launched the third installment of the Summer of Math Exposition contest. Every year, I’ve been impressed and inspired by the quality of some of the videos in this con…
In 2011 I gave a 15-minute talk to a lay audience in London. The topic I had chosen was ergodicity breaking, and the challenge was clear: how do you get this across? I invented a coin-toss gamble, which has since become a go-to illustration of ergodicity break
Read my manifesto on Code as an alternative to Mathematics. Code for this article can be found on this Colab Notebook should you choose to follow along. Why Kalman Filters? Kalman filters are ingenius. If you have never heard of them, then a very intuitive (and arguably reductive) way to think about them is to
Exact line rendering of smooth surfaces is harder than anyone would think
When you think about the Fibonacci sequence, you probably imagine a swirling vortex of oscillating points stretching outwards to infinity: Okay, no, obviously you don’t. Yet.
We thought we were accelerating fast enough. Turns out we weren't.
