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Math & Algorithms

The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 213 posts.

2017
2

Deep image prior 'learns' on just one image

Deep convolutional networks have become a popular tool for image generation and restoration. Generally, their excellent performance is imputed to their ability to learn realistic image priors from a large number of example images. In this paper, we show that, on the contrary, the structure of a generator network is…

11

The Kolmogorov option

Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …

13

Floating Point Visually Explained

While I was writing the Wolfenstein 3D book [1] , I wanted to demonstrate how much of a handicap it was to work without floating points. My attempts at understanding floating points using canonical [2] articles [3] were met with resistance from my brain. I tried to find a different way. Something far from $(-1)^S *…

18

Vladimir Voevodsky has died

The Institute for Advanced Study is deeply saddened by the passing of Vladimir Voevodsky, Professor in the School of Mathematics.Voevodsky, a truly extraordinary and original mathematician, made many contributions to the field of mathematics, earning him numerous honors and awards, including the Fields Medal.

19

P vs. NP

For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…

28

MP3 for Image Compression (2006)

During some random discussion with my colleague today, I rediscovered an experiment I did quite some years ago: MP3 compression of image data. This is, feed raw 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale image data into an MP3 encoder, let it compress it, and decode the MP3 file again. After some conversion (the decoder will always…

30

Modes, Medians and Means: A Unifying Perspective

Introduction / Warning Link to heading Any traditional introductory statistics course will teach students the definitions of modes, medians and means. But, because introductory courses can’t assume that students have much mathematical maturity, the close relationship between these three summary statistics can’t be…