Hacker News with Generative AI: Math

Test if a number is even (wordpress.com)
You want to test if a number is even.
rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinking (arxiv.org)
We present rStar-Math to demonstrate that small language models (SLMs) can rival or even surpass the math reasoning capability of OpenAI o1, without distillation from superior models.
Fidget (mattkeeter.com)
Fidget is a library for representing, compiling, and evaluating large-scale math expressions, i.e. hundreds or thousands of arithmetic clauses.
Ask HN: Math (Academy) Discord Group (ycombinator.com)
I first heard about Math Academy last year here on HN. It took me some time to pull the trigger and I am now a happy subscriber looking to connect with other users - email's in my profile.
Benchmarking RSA Key Generation (filippo.io)
RSA key generation is both conceptually simple, and one of the worst implementation tasks of the field of cryptography engineering. Even benchmarking it is tricky, and involves some math: here’s how we generated a stable but representative “average case” instead of using the ordinary statistical approach.
U.S. math scores drop on major international test (chalkbeat.org)
U.S. fourth graders saw their math scores drop steeply between 2019 and 2023 on a key international test even as more than a dozen other countries saw their scores improve.
Mathics 7.0 – Open-source alternative to Mathematica (github.com/Mathics3)
A boy girl paradox – or maybe not? (shankwiler.com)
The most liked comment answers 1/2, but the user got worn down by others until he recanted and agreed that the answer is 1/3. Many other comments give lengthy explanations as to why the answer is 1/3.
It's hard to stop Math Acceleration once you start (kidswholovemath.substack.com)
It's hard to stop Math Acceleration once you start
SFO Ballot Measure Reflects 10-Year Battle to Reinstate 8th-Grade Algebra (justequations.org)
The San Francisco Unified School District, which pulled algebra from its middle schools 10 years ago in the name of equity, will bring the course back next fall, ending a controversial experiment that some say squandered the opportunity for advanced learners to excel in mathematics—and did little to close the achievement gap.
My Notes on Apple Math Notes (mlajtos.mu)
In 2024, Apple introduced their spin on this topic under the name Math Notes. In this article, I will provide my deep praise (and even deeper hate) for their attempt to bring a bit of innovation into the UX of math.
A Chinese maths 'prodigy' unravelled in cheating storm (bbc.com)
A 17-year-old girl in China hailed as a genius in a mathematics contest cheated, competition organisers have said - ending months of scepticism over her stellar results.
Probability-generating functions (entropicthoughts.com)
I have long struggled with understanding what probability-generating functions are and how to intuit them. There were two pieces of the puzzle missing for me, and we’ll go through both in this article.
California Discourages Schools from Offering Advanced Middle School Math (2023) (reason.com)
A small but growing number of American schools are reducing or delaying access to advanced courses. Most often, these changes have been enacted in the name of reducing achievement gaps between demographic groups. However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.
Show HN: Adventures in Math with Symbolic Programming (SymPy, Python) (github.com/lascauje)
Formulating a method as a computer-executable program and debugging that program is a powerful exercise in the learning process.
Theory of Everything Could Work: Wolfram's Hypergraphs (youtube.com)
The Languages of English, Math, and Programming (github.com/norvig)
DeepSeek: Advancing theorem proving in LLMs through large-scale synthetic data (arxiv.org)
To address this issue, we introduce an approach to generate extensive Lean 4 proof data derived from high-school and undergraduate-level mathematical competition problems.
How diffusion models work: the math from scratch (2022) (theaisummer.com)
Diffusion models are a new class of state-of-the-art generative models that generate diverse high-resolution images.
Show HN: Chebyshev approximation calculator (stuffmatic.com)
The box problem that baffled the boffins (theguardian.com)
Earlier today I set you the following puzzle, which has been doing the rounds in the academic community, because of its counter-intuitive result. Here it is again with the solution.
A Burrito Is a Monad (williamcotton.com)
A Burrito is a monad...
Is MathAcademy Worth It? Thoughts After 2k Experience Points (XP) (jonathanwhitmore.com)
For the past two months, I’ve dedicated daily practice to MathAcademy.com, accumulating more than 2,000 experience points (~40 hours of total work).
Show HN: A whiteboard that writes math equations (lasky.io)
Cohort #2LMT2 Participated in
How to Compose Math Problems (andreinc.net)
When I was a young student (around 12), my math teacher came-up with an unique requirement for his students to not only solve math problems but also to compose them.
Ask HN: Programmers Who Want to Get Better at Math (ycombinator.com)
I have some questions for programmers and software engineers who feel they're not good enough at math and want to improve, particularly with the goal of applying math to their current or future jobs, or who consider a career change.
REDUCE Computer Algebra System (sourceforge.net)
CalcGPT (calcgpt.io)
Mathstral: 7B LLM designed for math reasoning and scientific discovery (mistral.ai)
The Greatest Educational Life Hack: Learning Math Ahead of Time (justinmath.com)