Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 213 posts.

Math & Algorithms
68

Communicating Advanced Mathematics to Kids

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’…

74

Why is the Quintic Unsolvable?

In this article, I hope to convince you that the quintic equation is unsolvable, in the sense that I can’t write down the solution to the equation \[ ax^5 + bx^4 + cx^3 + dx^2 + ex + f = 0 \] using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, raising to an integer power, and taking an integer root. In fact, I…

79

Matrices from a geometric perspective

Graphics is all about geometry. In particular, there are points that have a certain color, and the pattern of colors gives you a certain picture. You can change the way the points are distributed by applying certain transformations like translation (movement), rotation and scaling. While most people familiar with the…