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Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
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The stable marriage problem and modern dating
Attempting to model modern dating using the lessons learned from the stable marriage problem
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Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era
The Simons Foundation today announced a new set of initiatives that will help the mathematics community navigate the rapid rise of artificial intelligence in the field. Under a partnership…
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A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms
The OpenAI algorithm for the FFT is less a breakthrough and more a malicious exploit.
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Math on GitHub: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Finally! On May 19, 2022, GitHub released one of its most requested features: Math support on Markdown! Many had been anticipating this for years, including myself, so much in fact that I wrote a browser extension to get there early. (xhub, it can do a few other things so check it out.)
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Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation
The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists; it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation. Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific…
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NP-overrated
If you learned about NP-hard problems in university, your takeaway was probably this:
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Counterintuitive Properties of High Dimensional Space (2018)
Our geometric intuition developed in our three-dimensional world often fails us in higher dimensions. Many properties of even simple objects, such as higher dimensional analogs of cubes and spheres, are very counterintuitive. Below we discuss just a few of these properties in an attempt to convey some of the weirdness…
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Mathematics I Use (2012)
An explanation of the forms of mathematics I use on a daily basis as a working software engineer.
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The hacker's guide to uncertainty estimates
I made a New Year's resolution: every plot I make during 2018 will contain uncertainty estimates. Nine months in and I have learned a lot, so I put together a summary of some of the most useful methods.
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A 9-line summary of textbook physics
All their wonders in one table
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Bloom Filters by Example
A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
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Finding near-duplicates with Jaccard similarity and MinHash
How do you find near-duplicates in a massive collection of documents? An exploration of the Jaccard similarity metric, and the MinHash hashing trick used to efficiently approximate it at web scale.
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Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams
Materials from our SIGGRAPH '20 paper.
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Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)
I discuss several commonly held perspectives on the complex numbers and explore how their differences engage with several aspects of structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics.
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Wordle-solving state of the art: all optimality results so far
Almost all mathematical questions one could have about Wordle are settled by now. I summarize here what is known so far.
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Clean your codebase with basic information theory
Cut out everything that's not surprising.
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What TLA+ can and can't check
Let's chill just a little bit on the "TLA+ will save AI from itself" narrative
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Algebraic Semantics for Machine Knitting
As programming languages researchers, we’re entitled to a certain level of mathematical rigor behind the languages we write and analyze. Programming languages have semantics , which are definitions of what statements in the language mean. We can use those semantics to do all sorts of useful things, like error…
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Speeding up atan2f
`atan2f` is an important but slow trigonometric function. In this article we'll explain how to approximate it, and implement a version 50x faster than `glibc` on batches of inputs.
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Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal
There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the…
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Viewing Matrices and Probability as Graphs
Today I'd like to share an idea. It's a very simple idea. It's not fancy and it's certainly not new. In fact, I'm sure many of you have thought about it already. But if you haven't—and even if you have!—I hope you'll take a few minutes to enjoy it with me. Here's the idea: Every matrix corresponds to a graph. So…
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A collection of things that are Turing-complete by accident (2013)
A list of things that were not supposed to be Turing-complete, but are.
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Dijkstra’s algorithm and the Fibonacci heap
A couple of Sundays ago, I wrote an implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm in Clojure. The core algorithm came to twenty-five lines. I banged out the code as...