The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
A dimension is a physical quantity that can be measured, while a unit is a specific amount of a physical quantity. For example, time is a dimension, which can be measured in temporal units such as hours or seconds.
Five not-quite-normal uses
Why does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?
Let's review the most important math topics used by game devs, reflect about math education, and discuss techniques that can be used to improve the way we learn new math topics.
Prompted by your blog post this morning, I attach a plot from Figure 3 of They Still Haven’t Told You showing overnight and intraday returns to AIG (with logarithmic vertical scale, updated with data through the end of October).
Tech Notes on Cubic Bezier Curves, Perlin Noise, and Minimal Rotation Frames
Imagine we want to compute the square root of a number n n n . The basic idea of Heron’s method , named after the mathematician and engineer, Heron of Alexandria, is to find a number g g g that is close to n \sqrt{n} n and to then average that with the number n / g n/g n / g , which corrects for the fact that g g g…
Cistercian numerals were invented by the Cistercian order of monks in the 13th century. Giuseppe Frisella explains how the notation system works: A vertical str
What is PageRank algorithm? How can it be used in various graph database use cases? How to use it in Memgraph? If these questions are keeping you up at night, here is a blog post that will finally put your mind at ease.
Harvard Magazine printed the following chart that confirms a trend in undergraduate majors that we all know about: students are favoring STEM majors at the expense of humanities.
Time for some hard-core geeking-out. This comment on HN by /u/jiggawatts struck me as a brilliant idea: it's an intuitive counter-example t...
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
Recently, somebody shared on Twitter a new proof of the irrationality of √2. Its claimed advantage is that “it requires no knowledge of mathematics above the definition of what it means for a number to be irrational, and can be written almost in one line.” These claims are dubious: the usual proof, which I’ve…
While training small neural networks to perform binary addition, a surprising solution emerged that allows the network to solve the problem very effectively. This post explores the mechanism behind that solution and how it relates to analog electronics.
My colleagues and I are disagreeing on the differentiation between machine learning and Bayesian statistical approaches. I find them philosophically distinct, but there are some in our group who would like to lump them together as both examples of machine learning. I have been favoring a definition for Bayesian…
This text presents a method for embedding a programmable, general-purpose, digital computer into Tetris. It describes the capabilities and performance of an implementation that runs Tetris on Tetris.
When was the first time you had to use LaTeX? If you are like most people, it was probably suddenly forced upon you during your first math or CS class where you had to start writing proofs, with minimal guidance on how to get started. Unfortunately, this meant that while many people have good operational knowledge of…
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…
Facts and figures on U.S. stock market returns from 1871 to 2024. Annual returns, likelihood of losing money, best / worst months, and more.
Lisp in Life is a Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway’s Game of Life.
Just days after we celebrated my wife’s 40th birthday, she came down with COVID, meaning she’s been isolating and I’ve been spending almost all my time dealing with our kids. But …
A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong. We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy…
Binary search is a workhorse of competitive programming. There are occasional easy problems where binary search is the solution in and of itself; more often, it’s used as a primitive building block…
Casual introduction to the uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics and how it leads to neutron stars and superfluids
