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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.

Math & Algorithms
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1504

The Riemann Hypothesis

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…

1507

RSA: Theory and Implementation

RSA has been a staple of public key cryptography for over 40 years, and is still being used today for some tasks in the newest TLS 1.3 standard. This post describes the theory behind RSA - the math that makes it work, as well as some practical considerations; it also presents a complete implementation of RSA key…

1508

Shenanigans With Hash Tables

One reason to know how your data structures work is so that when your problem has unusual constraints you can tweak how they work to fit the problem better or work faster. In this article I’ll talk about four different fun tweaks to the concept of a hash table that I made in the process of using hash tables to…

1510

Escher-Like Spiral Tilings

The artist M.C. Escher drew many lovely tilings, which he called “regular divisions of the plane”. He worked hard to ensure that his tilings were of lifelike animal forms such as birds and fish. He filled notebooks with hand-drawn sketches of tilings, many of which later found their way into his woodcuts. If you’d…

1513

A Molecular Near Miss

I’m thrilled to report that I’m a co-author of the article “ An ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage displaying reversible assembly “, which was recently published in Nature . This work is the result of an exciting collaboration between biochemists, physicists, structural biologists, mathematicians, and others…

1523

Curve fitting A: Linear Least Squares

The graph on the left shows a third example, taken from analytical chemistry: a straight-line calibration data set where X = concentration and Y = instrument reading (Y = a + b X). Click to download that data . The blue dots are the data points. They don't all fall in a perfect straight line because of random noise…