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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 212 posts.
I recently returned from the 2025 Annual Meeting of the “Localization of Waves” collaboration (supported by the Simons Foundation, with additional related support from the NSF), where I…
Doing anti-aliasing on SDF is not as straightforward as it seems. Most of the time, we see people use a smoothstep with hardcoded constants, sometimes with screen space information, sometimes cryptic or convoluted formulas. Even if SDFs have the perfect mathematical properties needed for a clean anti-aliasing, the…
CVE-2025-7783 is a very recent vulnerability affecting a lot of applications in the Node.js ecosystem including those which use axios or the deprecated request library. In all honesty, this vulnera…
David Zuckerman The 2025 Gödel Prize has been awarded to Eshan Chattopadhyay and David Zuckerman for their paper Explicit two-source extrac...
I have a lot in the works for the this month's Logic for Programmers release. Among other things, I'm completely rewriting the chapter on Logic Programming...
I've created a new format for encoding real numbers on computers. I'm proud of it! Let's dive in.
I’m a great believer in low-tech math. I don’t like to rely on things a computer tells me; what if there’s a bug in the code? I prefer trusting things that I can check for myself. At the same…
It's a justifiable copout, but it's still a copout.
There are very few universal rules in software engineering, but there are are a lot of near-universal principles. Things like "prefer composition to...
INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL FILTERS WITH AUDIO APPLICATIONS
I find myself writing yet another toy parser, as one does during a Christmas break. It roughly follows Resilient LL Parsing Tutorial. Not because I need resilience, but mostly because I find producing a syntax tree and a collection of diagnostics a more natural fit for the problem than bailing out on the first error.
In the previous chapter, we assumed that we can uniformly randomly sample our domain. However, it’s not obvious how to actually do so—in fact, how can a deterministic computer even generate random numbers? 1
In the early 1930s, Pascual Jordan attempted to formalise the algebraic properties of Hermitian matrices. In particular: Hermitian matrices form a real vector space: we can add and subtract Hermiti…
Introduction In this blog post you are going to read about two things:
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
The number of characters was 464 characters at first, but thanks to the community it got reduced further, and the article updated accordingly.
The first of a series of envisioned blog posts on lambda calculus, and Lisp. It’s unclear exactly where to start: there is a whole heap of interesting issues, both theoretical and in terms of concrete implementations, which tangle and interconnect. A particular application of lambda calculus is a very salient…
This is a post about multiplying polynomials, convolution sums and the connection between them.
Quarto Academic Website Template adapted by Dr. Gang He
Chris Grossack's math blog and professional website.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Usually I write about solutions to problems I’ve worked out, but I’ve found myself increasingly becoming interesting in where solutions come from. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Boorstin’s excellent The Discoverers , which I’d strongly recommend.
Understanding derivatives and logarithms of transforms
How would you allocate money to a set of independent assets with to minimize volatility if some assets are more volatile than others?
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
While reading through the fantastic book *[The Lost Art of Logarithms](https://www.lostartoflogarithms.com/)* by [Charles Petzold](https://www.charlespetzold.com/) I was nerd-sniped by a [simple method](https://www.lostartoflogarithms.com/chapter04/) of estimating the logarithm of any number base 10. According to the…
28 . That's the minimum number of AND or OR operators you need in order to write any Boolean function of five variables. Alex Healy and I computed that in April 2010. Until then, I believe no one had ever known that little fact. This post describes how we computed it and how we almost got scooped by Knuth's Volume 4A…
The conventional wisdom is that hashing more entropy sources can't hurt: if H is any modern cryptographic hash function then H(x,y,z) is at least as good a random number as H(x,y), no matter how awful z is. So we pile one source on top of another, hashing them all together and hoping that at least one of them is good.
This is a brief continuation of a previous post ( Repo ), which introduced such visualization for collatz sequences based on Langton’s Ant .
Solving LinkedIn Queens in the LogicT monad
