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Alligator Eggs
In 2007, I met Philip Wadler at a conference, who mentioned to me that he wanted to teach lambda calculus to his eight-year-old children.
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Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? (2007)
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
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Math For Programmers
Probability theory might be the most useful area for programmers, but it is also a blurry field, difficult to learn right. You might check this book for details, and there is also an free, online draft version available. The Logic of Science
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Fixing Hacker News: A mathematical approach
There is a certain phenomenon that seems to happen in almost every online community of user-generated content. A community is created: the ...
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Google Earth Fractals
The following is a "photographic" gallery of fractal patterns found while exploring the planet with Google Earth. Each is provided with a KMZ file so the reader can explore the region for themselves. Readers are encouraged to submit their own discoveries for inclusion, credits will be included. Besides being examples…
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I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets
When my friends hear me say that I’m buying a lottery ticket for a big draw I often get ...
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Quadtrees and Hilbert Curves
Last Thursday night at Oredev, after the sessions, was "Birds of a Feather" - a sort of mini-unconference. Anyone could write up a topic on the whiteboard; interested individuals added their names, and each group got allocated a room to chat about the topic. I joined the "Spatial Indexing" group, and we spent a…
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Making MathBox: Presentation-Quality Math with Three.js and WebGL
Presentation-quality math with Three.js and WebGL.
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Fast Lossless Color Image Compression
In the research field of compression, the usual goal is to achieve the best possible compression rate. The best known algorithms, however, are very slow, and sometimes impractical for real-world ap…
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Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby
"How two ugly parents (mathematically) can make a beautiful baby"
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The 17x17 problem solved
THE 17x17 PROBLEM HAS BEEN SOLVED!!!!! On Nov 30, 2009 I posted here the following challenge: If someone emails me a 4-coloring of...
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A New Way To Solve Linear Equations (over finite fields)
Impossible but true: a new approach to linear systems Prasad Raghavendra is an expert in many aspects of complexity theory, especially the foundations of approximation theory. He recently was a col…
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Map Simplification with Visvalingam's Algorithm
An interesting challenge in cartography is getting data of the appropriate resolution. As Lewis Fry Richardson observed , the more precisely you measure the length of a coastline, the longer it appears; geographic shapes have infinite complexity. Digital displays, in contrast, are limited by pixels. Choosing too high…
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