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What do new Sudoku techniques teach us about real-world problem solving?
What do revolutionary new Sudoku techniques teach us about real-world problem solving?
Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
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Neural Networks Are Impressively Good at Compression
I’m trying to get into neural networks. There have been a couple big breakthroughs in the field in recent years and suddenly my side project of messing around with programming languages seeme…
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Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean Part 1
A tutorial Formal Verification using Lean for cryptographic engineers. Implement and prove correctness of the One-Time pad following a cryptography book.
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Geometry, Algebra, and Intuition (2017)
I have a confession to make: I have always found symbolic algebra more intuitive than geometric pictures. I think you’re supposed to feel the opposite way, and I greatly admire people who think and communicate in pictures, but for me, it’s usually a struggle.
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Michael Atiyah has died
We are very sorry to hear of the death of Michael Atiyah. Michael was a giant of mathematics. He held many positions including Savilian Professor of Geometry here in Oxford, President of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the founding Directorship of the Isaac Newton Institute and Chancellor of…
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The Mathematics of Paul Graham's Bias Test
A major problem in detecting biased decisionmaking is the problem of unknown inputs. For example, suppose a venture capitalist has a public portfolio which has funded 75% male founders and 25% female. Is this venture capitalist biased against women? It's impossible to know - perhaps only 10% of his applicants were …
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Formally modeled Dreidel for no good reason
I can mathematically prove the game's not fun.
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How I Learned to Love Algebraic Geometry
A more polished version of this article appeared on Nautilus on 2019 February 28. This version has some more material. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Algebraic Geometry In my 50s, too old …
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Calculus for the Curious
Some weeks ago I got involved in a discussion on Twitter about, which books to recommend on the history of calculus. Somebody chimed in that Steven Strogatz’s new book would tell you all that you n…
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Logical fallacies in software engineering
How our mind falls short trying to short cut.
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Cracking the Adventure Time cipher
I recently read “Adventure Time: Volume 1”, a comic book based on the smart animated series of the same name. In the comic, I found some odd looking messages at the …
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Penrose 3.0
Create beautiful diagrams just by typing math notation in plain text.
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PageRank algorithm for graph databases
What is PageRank algorithm? How can it be used in various graph database use cases? How to use it in Memgraph? If these questions are keeping you up at night, here is a blog post that will finally put your mind at ease.
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The Sun seen through the Earth in “neutrino light” (2007)
Physics blog quantum computation
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Lost in Math
Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of a…
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Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie
How I used a compressed trie data structure to encode Icelandic declension data.
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Bloom Filters
The original motivation for the creation of Bloom filters is efficient set membership, using a probabilistic approach to significantly reduce the time and space required to reject items that are not members in a certain set.
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2048 Bit RSA and the Year 2030
Update: NIST released a draft that modified their recommendations (Oct 2024) 1) . RSA 2048 is to be only considered “deprecated” after 2030. The draft states:
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Hurried Thoughts: You're Wrong About Tidal-Locking
Space Engine ...
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What's Going on in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models
Stephen Wolfram explores minimal models and their visualizations, aiming to explain the underneath functionality of neural nets and ultimately machine learning.
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Test for Divisibility by 13
How to manually test whether a large number is divisible by 7, 11, and 13 all at the same time.
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Progress on provable inference for large language models
Sharing progress on a powerful type of cryptographic proof known as a zkSNARK, which is uniquely fit for provable inference.
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Why Busy Beaver hunters fear the Antihydra
In which I explore the biggest barrier in the busy beaver game. What is Antihydra, what is the Collatz conjecture, how are they connected, and what makes them so daunting?