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Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,394 posts.
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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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Rutgers Graduate Student Finds New Prime-Generating Formula
Studying prime numbers is like playing the guitar. No, really, let me explain. The guitar is a simple instrument: six strings, some frets,...
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About the origins of the equals sign
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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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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Ask HN: How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress?
Ron Jeffries attempts to create a sudoku solver - here , here , here , here and here . (You really ought to read these articles. They are u...
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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 Aggregate Magic Algorithms (2015)
There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types ( here are a few WWW sites). Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we've devised or…
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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…
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How Credit Card Numbers Are Generated
Visa,Master Card,Discover, and American Express credit card validation and generation techniques using the luhn algorithm.
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Visualizing the Fourth Dimension Using Color
Color can be used to indicate position in 4D space
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Energy Is Not Conserved (2010)
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
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The odd one out - inspired by IQ tests
Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.
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Bayes' Theorem explained by Yudkowsky
Bayes’ Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction.
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Maze-generation algorithms, with JS demos
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
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The Shocking State of Contemporary "Mathematics"
I just came back from attending the 1052nd AMS (sectional) meeting at Penn State, last weekend, and realized that the Kingdom of Mathematics is dead. Instead we have a disjoint union of narrow specialties , and people who know everything about nothing, and nothing about anything (except their very narrow acre). Not…
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A Calculus Analogy: Integrals as Multiplication
Integrals are often described as finding the area under a curve. This description is too narrow: it's like saying multiplication exists to find the area of…
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Discrete Analysis – A new type of math journal
This post is to announce the start of a new mathematics journal, to be called Discrete Analysis. While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important w…
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Guessing the Teacher's Password
When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, so…
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A 3700-year-old proof that the diagonal of a unit square has length √2
Clicking on an image will bring up the same image at higher resolution (a download of about about 100 KB). Clicking on that in turn will download an image of about 300 KB.
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Top Ten Things that Math Probability Says about the Real World
Talk given at Cornell University, April 14 2008. Like most scientists, I habitually just write slides and extemporize the actual spoken words. For this one talk I wrote the following script, though (being hard to break the habits of 30 years) I didn't stick closely to the script. Each link is one slide.
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Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach
Name the most widely used bytecode interpreter or virtual machine. Sun's JVM? Adobe's Flash? .NET and Mono? Perl? Python? PHP? These are all certainly popular, but there's one more widely used than all those combined. That bytecode interpreter is Henry Spencer's regular expression library and its many descendants.