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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
Update (August 11, 2011): Thanks to everyone who offered useful feedback! I uploaded a slightly-revised version, adding a “note of humility” to the introduction, correcting the footnot…
In celebration of the detection of gravitational waves, Stephen Wolfram looks forward and discusses what technology black holes could make possible.
Exploring the math behind hash collisions.
This post is just a quick note on some of the pitfalls we encounter when dealing with high-dimensional problems, even when working with something as simple as a Gaussian distribution. Last week I wrote about mixup [https://www.inference.vc/mixup-data-dependent-data-augmentation/] a new data-augmentation...
This summer, 3Blue1Brown launched the third installment of the Summer of Math Exposition contest. Every year, I’ve been impressed and inspired by the quality of some of the videos in this con…
In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic...
Wolfram tech and its dedicated website now easily predict eclipses. A look at advances in understanding and science from ancient eclipse data thousands of years old through current eclipse calculations.
While he was over in the UK for a book tour and lecture series, Professor Donald Knuth made time to talk to BCS editor Justin Richards about his life.
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras.
Find Bayes' Theorem confusing? Let's break down this famous formula using Lego to help you build up a better intuition for this foundational concept!
My last article had tips for for arena allocation . This next article demonstrates a technique for building bespoke hash maps that compose nicely with arena allocation. In addition, they’re fast, simple, and automatically scale to any problem that could reasonably be solved with an in-memory hash map. To avoid…
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
What's the meaning of "numbers" and "arithmetic operations"? We consult Georg Cantor's turtles and look at Giuseppe Peano's code.
The phrase “foundations of mathematics” is bandied about frequently these days, but it’s clear that there is widespread confusion about what it means. Some say that a proof assistant must be based on a foundation of mathematics, and therefore that the foundations of mathematics refers to some sort of formal system…
A useful theorem attributed to the probably first mathematician ever, Thales of Miletus (ca. 624 BC-ca. 546 BC) is one of most elementary and intuitive ever stated.
Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.
Economist Gary Smith sends along this post with the above title and the subtitle, “Market prices are not invariably equal to intrinsic values.” Here’s Smith:
Edited 8/16 to correct attributions to Alon and Boppana and to Tardos, thanks to an anonymous commenter for the correction Yesterday, Norbert Blum posted a preprint with a claimed proof that $latex…
Explore what’s new, what’s next, and what should be on your radar in the world of transportation. Our insights are supported by real-world data from our partners across the globe.
In many large-scale web services, multiple layers of stateless and stateful services are seperated by load balancers. Load balancing can be done with dedicated hardware, with dedicated software load balancers, using DNS trickery or through a load-balancing mechanism in the client. In large systems, the resources and…
Columbia professor Johan de Jong has spent the last 15 years gathering the foundational theorems of algebraic geometry in one place. His creation, the Stacks Project, offers a new model for organizing and visualizing mathematical information.
In this post you will learn what hash tables are, why you would use them, and how they are used to implement dictionaries in the most popular Python interpreter—CPython.
The deficiencies of the Unit Sphere and an exploration of Lie groups.
Discover how prover-verifier games improve the legibility of language model outputs, making AI solutions clearer, easier to verify, and more trustworthy for both humans and machines.
I’ve just uploaded to the arXiv the paper “Decomposing a factorial into large factors”. This paper studies the quantity $latex {t(N)}&fg=000000$, defined as the largest quanti…
Bill Tavis designed this lovely vintage-style map of the familiar fractal shape, the Mandelbrot set. He is selling a poster version of the map, starting at the
For those who love numbers, and those who love them.
