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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 107 posts.
Fueling a revolution in cryptography and theoretical computer science through his breakthroughs in fully homomorphic encryption, leading to the possibility of more secure cloud computing.
Sometimes taking the easy way out isn’t nearly as bad as it might seem! posted Thursday February 13th, 2014 Tagged: Math
A few posts back I was concerned with optimising the WiFi reception in my flat, and I chose a simple method for calculating the distribution of electromagnetic intensity. I casually mentioned that I really should be doing things more rigorously by solving the Helmholtz equation, but then didn't. Well, spurred on by a…
See also Frequentism and Bayesianism: A Python-driven Primer , a peer-reviewed article partially based on this content.
I haven't been blogging recently because my new startup is taking up all my time, but someone needs to stand up and say the emperor has no c...
Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/categories-from-scratch.html. Alternate formats: Source, PDF. Prologue The concept of category from mathematics happens to be useful to computer programmers in many ways. Unfortunately, all “good” explanations of categories so far have…
I’m a (50%) professor of mathematics and (50%) professor of molecular & cell biology at UC Berkeley. There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with biologists and…
Proposing technology for pure mathematics: curating concepts, constructs, theorems, & literature; precise symbolic language; automated computations...
A portfolio of HPC tools help data scientists, researchers, and developers efficiently build cross-architecture applications.
What are Gray codes, and why are they so useful?
Clever tricks used by medieval astronomers to tabulate sines at every degree, before calculators and before calculus.
What is the largest volume cylinder it is possible to carve from a solid sphere? Also, so you know about the napkin ring problem?
I recently wrapped up a fun paper with my coauthors Ben Fish, Adam Lelkes, Lev Reyzin, and Gyorgy Turan in which we analyzed the computational complexity of a model of the popular MapReduce framework. Check out the preprint on the arXiv. Update: this paper is now published in the proceedings of DISC2015. As usual I’ll…
Why we should really be quoting fuel consumption figures as 'gallons per mile' and not 'miles per gallon'.
Correlations are oft interpreted as evidence for causation; this is oft falsified; do causal graphs explain why this is so common, because the number of possible indirect paths greatly exceeds the direct paths necessary for useful manipulation?
Here’s an excerpt from Love and Math, a book by Edward Frenkel. The author writes about mathematics and his career. One of the stories is about …
A gentle introduction to backpropagation, a method of programming neural networks
For which fraction of the US is the nearest brewery further away than the nearest distillery? Analysis and visualization done with Wolfram Language.
