The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
When most people think about pi, they associate the mathematical constant with arcs and circles. Mathematicians, however, are accustomed to seeing it in a variety of fields. But two University physicists were still surprised to find it lurking in a quantum mechanics formula for the energy states of the hydrogen atom.
It’s time we did a non-pandemic related newsletter issue. So this week we’ll do something more fun. Today we’re going to talk about an interesting journal article that came out two weeks ago,…
Efficient elliptic curves tend not to have a prime order. This discusses the problems this causes, and the solutions.
Note: this post was written for Lean 3; the latest version, Lean 4, is a very different language. Turn back the clock to 2009: a confused physics major newly infatuated with math and computer science, I enrolled in MATH 273: Numbers and Proofs at the University of Calgary. This wasn’t my first encounter with…
A few weeks ago I wrote about Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts and how it relates to Bayesian inference. In this post I want to back up a little bit and explain what Bayesian inference is, and eventually rediscover the idea of a paradigm shift just from understanding how Bayesian inference works.
Layoffs are certainly one of the effects of battling COVID-19. What sort of unemployment rate might we see in the second quarter of 2020?
Most schools teach number systems the same way. First they teach natural numbers (or “counting numbers”), then integers, rationals, reals, and complex numbers, in that order. Rationals are countable and reals are not, but that’s okay. Once you start taking roots, you need a number system more powerful than a countable…
Klein - Realtime Projective Geometric Algebra
Learn the meaning behind mathematical symbols used in Machine Learning using your knowledge of Python.
This is our most recent work, started and led by Aleksey Charapko . (This is a joint post with him.) You can get the paper at arxiv.org . Th...
How a Python function relates to a two thousand year old debate in philosophy
A playable disease simulation
When I launched bit-player.org in 2006, displaying any sort of mathematical notation on the web was torture. I would typeset an equation in LaTeX, convert the output to a JPEG image, upload the image file to a directory on the server, and embed a reference to the file in an HTML img tag. The process was cumbersome and…
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras.
A blog by Sam Greydanus
Using a SAT solver to find Game of Life states that turn into pictures.
As part of social distancing efforts to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, several universities have now transitioned, or begun transitioning, to online teaching models. (My home unive…
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
Engineer friends often ask me: Graph Deep Learning sounds great, but are there any big commercial success stories? Is it being deployed in practical applications? Besides the obvious ones–recommendation systems at Pinterest, Alibaba and Twitter–a slightly nuanced success story is the Transformer architecture, which…
If you make $10 profit each time you sell a product, what cost per conversion should you aim for? Answering this question isn't easy, but it can teach us a…
To celebrate being alive for a billion seconds, Daniel Bruin built a machine with 100 gears with a 10-to-1 gear ratio…meaning that the overall gear ratio is a g
Founder, Investor, Author
Last month finally I had an opportunity to use Bloom filters. I became fascinated with the promise of this data structure, but I quickly realized it had some drawbacks. This blog post is the tale of my brief love affair with Bloom filters.
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
Recently, the formal methods specialist Hillel Wayne posted an interesting article discussing whether Donald Knuth was actually framed when Jon Bentley asked him to demonstrate literate programming . (Knuth came up with an 8-page long monolithic listing, whereas in a critique Doug McIlroy provided a six line shell…
Despite two linear algebra classes, my knowledge consisted of "Matrices, determinants, eigen something something". Why? Well, let's try this course format:
We live in interesting times. For instance, we are witnessing several extinction events all at once. One of them is the massive extinction of species. The other is the extinction of jobs. Both are …
Sketches of an interactive arithmetic for programming by Glen Chiacchieri.
For over six years now, I've been studying mathematics on my own in my spare time - working my way through books, exercises, and online courses. In this post I'll share what books and resources I've worked through and recommend and also tips for anyone who wants to go on a similar adventure.
