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Teaching Linear Algebra
In a recent Hacker News post I made reference to an interesting teaching experience I had in the mid-90s. This is a longer explanation of ...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 50 posts.
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World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Summary of all the MIT Introduction to Algorithms lectures
As you all may know, I watched and posted my lecture notes of the whole MIT Introduction to Algorithms course. In this post I want to summarize all the topics that were covered in the lectures and point out some of the most interesting things in them. Actually, before I wrote this article, I had started writing an...
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Mastering The Fourier Transform in One Day
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Beautiful plots of roots of polynomials
Click on the picture for bigger view. Roots of quadratic polynomials are in grey; roots of cubics are in cyan; roots of quartics are in red and roots of quintics are in black. The horizontal axis of symmetry is the real axis; the vertical axis of symmetry is the imaginary axis. The big hole in the middle is centered…
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The New Science of Causation
It seems like each new day brings another one of those headlines: regular sleep “linked to” life expectancy, playing video games “associated with” surgical prowess, bullies “at risk” of becoming criminals, and “does breastfeeding reduce a baby’s blood pressure?” (the old rhetorical question gambit). Sometimes the…
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SciPy - the embarrassing way to code
I’ve programmed in many languages before, indeed I’ve spent at least a year working in Basic, C, C++, C#, java, assembler, modula-2, powerhouse and prolog. One thing I’ve never done before is Matlab, well except a few basic exercises for some course I did way back. A couple of years ago I started using python and more…
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The 17x17 challenge. "Worth $289.00. This is not a joke."
The 17x17 challenge: worth $289.00. I am not kidding. Definition: The n x m grid is c-colorable if there is a way to c-color the vertic...
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How to determine if your A/B test is statistically significant
A/B testing tools often lie about whether something is "statistically significant." Here's an extremely simple, mathematically sound formula to compute it for yourself.
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A bestiary of algorithmic trading strategies
One of the things which confronted me when I got interested in quantitative finance is the varieties of different kinds of quant. Now I realize this is pretty simple. Quants come in three basic var…
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Why I left math
Reading how shocked Doron Zeilberger is at the state of modern mathematics reminded me of why I left the subject. Math departments regularl...
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Netflix Prize 10% barrier broken
Error Page
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Functional Geometry
Peter Henderson wrote an article about a method to describe pictures with functional programs. I've implemented it in Lisp. An updated version of the article uses curves and different shapes and has some references to other applications for this method, like "An Algebra of Music".
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Confessions of a Math Idiot
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
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A critique of The Black Swan
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Math Every Day
Math Every Day Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™
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Women Prefer Poaching
Men tend to want the woman they see in front of them, while women want the man other women see:
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A Life that Added Up to Something: Paul Erdos (1996)
WASHINGTON - One of the most extraordinary minds of our time has "left." "Left" is the word Paul Erdos, a prodigiously gifted and productive mathematician, used for "died." "Died" is the word he used to signify "stopped doing math." Erdos never died. He continued doing math, notoriously a young person's field, right…
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The Busy Beaver Problem
Busy Beaver puts another one on the Turing Machine's tape (image from the book The New Turing Omnibus). The busy beaver problem is a fun theoretical computer science problem. Intuitively, the problem is to find the smallest program that outputs as many data as possible and eventually halts. More formally it goes…
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The Baby-Eating Aliens
(Part 1 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide") • This is a story of an impossible outcome, where AI never worked, molecular nanotechnology never worked, bio…