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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
I’ve often thought that we could do a lot better job of explaining “advanced” mathematics concepts in simple language for the benefit of a wider audience. As a student, I never liked being told, “We’ll explain that to you next year.” As a teacher, I’ve always wanted be able to give real answers to students’…
Those of you who know what public-key cryptography is may have already heard of ECC , ECDH or ECDSA . The first is an acronym for Elliptic Curve Cryptography, the others are names for algorithms based on it.
Update 2017-01-09: Laci claims to have found a workaround to the previously posted error, and the claim is again quasipolynoimal time! Updated arXiv paper to follow. Update 2017-01-04: Laci has posted an update on his paper. The short version is that one small step of his analysis was not quite correct, and the result…
There has been a sudden resurgence of interest in my "donut" code from 2006 , and I've had a couple requests to explain this one. It's been five years now, so it's not exactly fresh in my memory, so I will reconstruct it from scratch, in great detail, and hopefully get approximately the same result.
In part 1 of this series, we built a Sudoku solver based on translating Sudoku to SAT and then giving the resulting SAT instance to a SAT solver. We also benchmarked our solver and found out that it, unsurprisingly, loses to the state of the art of Sudoku solvers. Since
What are we really doing?
This incredible mathematical hat-trick is based on the paper Every positive integer is a sum of three palindromes by Javier Cilleruelo, Florian Luca and Lewis Baxter.
It’s time we did a non-pandemic related newsletter issue. So this week we’ll do something more fun. Today we’re going to talk about an interesting journal article that came out two weeks ago,…
Many logos, drawings and other graphical designs have the following shape in it. What is this shape? If you thought: "Ah-ha! I'm smart and r...
Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn't so bad. That random eviction isn't bad can be surprising — if your cache fills up and you have to get rid of something, choosing the least recently used (LRU) is an obvious choice, since you're…
A free, self-contained introduction to neural networks and differentiable programming, from automatic differentiation to transformers, with additional chapters on advanced topics.
The challenge The authoring platform of choice in many math-heavy disciplines is LaTeX. It produces typeset documents of excellent quality and handles formulas and mathematical diagrams extremely w…
A retirement project created and maintained by Tom O'Haver , Professor Emeritus , Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem introduces an impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of …
Can Hollywood's stamp of artistic excellence still be trusted?
In this post I derive the physics of pumping a swing and the physics of jumping from a swing. Then, using both pieces I compute the optimal strategy of jumping from a swing to maximize the traveled distance. I propose this game as a new Olympic sport.
The SMBC comic Convert included as the “Votey button” a challenge to extract a Waldo visual from the digits of π.
A few years ago I came across this video, showing a complex machine built entirely in Conway’s Game of Life:
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under homomorphic-hashing , damn-cool-algorithms , fountain-codes
Slot machines on the Las Vegas Strip return about 93 cents on the dollar. This is widely considered some of the worst odds in gambling. Yet on Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated prediction market, traders have wagered vast sums on longshot contracts with historical returns as low as 43 cents on the dollar. Thousands of…
I have a little secret: I don’t like the terminology, notation, and style of writing in statistics. I find it unnecessarily complicated. This shows up when trying to read about Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Take, for example, the abstract to the Markov Chain Monte Carlo article in the Encyclopedia of…
An online book about collision detection using Processing.
The Doomsday Algorithm gives the day of the week for any date (and you can do it in your head)
A blog about math by Nic Ford
