Hacker News with Generative AI: Math

Gemini 2.5 gets 24.4% on MathArena USAMO beating previous top score of 4.7% (matharena.ai)
MathArena is a platform for evaluation of LLMs on the latest math competitions and olympiads.
Artificial Intelligence, Math, Competitions
51 points by alphabetting 1 day ago | 9 comments
Limits of Smart: Molecules and Chaos (dynomight.substack.com)
Take me. Now take someone with the combined talents of Von Neumann, Archimedes, Ramanujan, and Mozart. Now take someone smarter again by the same margin and repeat that a few times.
Intelligence, Science, Philosophy, Math, Music
18 points by crescit_eundo 7 days ago | 6 comments
Mathup: Easy MathML authoring tool with a quick to write syntax (mathup.xyz)
Easy MathML authoring tool with a quick to write syntax.
Math, Tools, Software, Programming
126 points by runarberg 13 days ago | 37 comments
Napkin Math Tool (taylor.town)
Math, Tools, Productivity
134 points by surprisetalk 17 days ago | 33 comments
Statistical Formulas for Programmers (2013) (evanmiller.org)
Being able to apply statistics is like having a secret superpower.
Programming, Statistics, Math
240 points by Tomte 22 days ago | 39 comments
A new Sudoku layout with 81 uniquely shaped cells (danielchasehooper.com)
Something productive finally came from my daily Sudoku habit: I invented a new type of puzzle that I call “Cracked Sudoku”. It’s named after cracked dirt:
Puzzles, Sudoku, Games, Creative Projects, Math
188 points by dmit 22 days ago | 75 comments
Math Academy pulled me out of the Valley of Despair (bearblog.dev)
When it comes to learning a new skill such as how to drive a car, playing a sport, or an academic discipline, there is a unique relationship between a person’s confidence and their level of competence at different points of the journey.
Learning, Education, Personal Development, Math
230 points by gmays 32 days ago | 156 comments
MathB.in Is Shutting Down (susam.net)
Thirteen years ago, on a quiet Saturday night, I sat down and began developing MathB.in.
Math, Web Development, Community, Shutdowns, Nostalgia
66 points by susam 39 days ago | 59 comments
Making any integer with four 2s (thegreenplace.net)
There's a cute math puzzle that can be interesting to folks on very different levels:
Math, Puzzles, Integers
238 points by ibobev 39 days ago | 1 comments
A simple geometry question that fools almost everyone (theguardian.com)
A triangle and a rectangle walked into a pub
Math, Puzzles, Geometry
16 points by mywacaday 44 days ago | 14 comments
Ask HN: Books or games to teach kids math (ycombinator.com)
Anything that can teach a 3 years old kid math, assuming he knows how to count to 10. But also interested in resources that that would take him beyond that and get him to fall in love with math as he grows up.
Education, Children, Math, Games, Books
11 points by aalhour 46 days ago | 8 comments
Just give the man the fish (i.e. just answer the question) (plover.com)
Last week I complained about a Math SE pathology in which OP asks a simple question, and instead of an answer gets an attempt at a socratic dialog. I ended by saying:
Math, Stack Exchange, Online Communities
27 points by camtarn 52 days ago | 15 comments
Explorable Flexagons: Learn to create and flex flexagons (2020) (loki3.com)
Learn to create and flex flexagons
Math, Art, Puzzles, Papercrafts
47 points by PaulHoule 57 days ago | 10 comments
I compared my daughter against SOTA models on math puzzles (michalprzadka.com)
I created an AI math reasoning benchmark using puzzles from this year’s GMIL competition — a long-running international mathematical challenge that I participated in myself back in 1998. The results are quite interesting: some of the most advanced AI models performed comparably to my 11-year-old daughter, while others struggled significantly. This experiment gives some amusing insights into current AI capabilities in mathematical reasoning, especially when compared to human performance at the middle school level.
Artificial Intelligence, Math, Education, Benchmarking, Human-AI Comparison
15 points by przadka 61 days ago | 3 comments
Orbit Spirograph (2019) (redblobgames.com)
Inspired by John Carlos Baez’s post about the Pentagram of Venus[1]. This is the position of Venus relative to the Earth. I got distracted by fun spirograph style images.
Visualizations, Math, Astronomy
75 points by hwayne 70 days ago | 7 comments
Why is zero plural? (2024) (stackexchange.com)
For example, if we choose two 2s, zero 3s, and one 5, we get the divisor
Grammar, Linguistics, English Language, Math
125 points by not_a_boat 72 days ago | 200 comments
Test if a number is even (wordpress.com)
You want to test if a number is even.
Programming, Math, Algorithms
42 points by Fake4d 82 days ago | 62 comments
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.
Artificial Intelligence, Math, Science
39 points by roboboffin 85 days ago | 7 comments
Fidget (mattkeeter.com)
Fidget is a library for representing, compiling, and evaluating large-scale math expressions, i.e. hundreds or thousands of arithmetic clauses.
Math, Libraries, Programming, Software
556 points by todsacerdoti 85 days ago | 55 comments
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.
Online Communities, Education, Math, Discord
6 points by epsilon-delta 91 days ago | 6 comments
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.
Cryptography, Benchmarking, Security, Math
49 points by mfrw 94 days ago | 32 comments
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.
Education, International Tests, Math, United States
348 points by akantler 114 days ago | 693 comments
Mathics 7.0 – Open-source alternative to Mathematica (github.com/Mathics3)
Math, Open Source, Software, Programming, Mathematica
223 points by adius 118 days ago | 58 comments
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.
Probability, Math, Puzzles, Logic
12 points by iuvcaw 138 days ago | 0 comments
It's hard to stop Math Acceleration once you start (kidswholovemath.substack.com)
It's hard to stop Math Acceleration once you start
Education, Math, Parenting, Learning
93 points by sebg 140 days ago | 96 comments
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.
Education, Math, San Francisco, Equity
8 points by throwoutway 142 days ago | 1 comments
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.
Software, Apple, Math
178 points by mlajtos 146 days ago | 67 comments
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.
Cheating, Education, China, Math, Competition
10 points by impish9208 147 days ago | 0 comments
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.
Probability, Math, Statistics, Data Science
207 points by todsacerdoti 155 days ago | 48 comments
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.
Education, Math, Policy, Social Justice
72 points by hui-zheng 160 days ago | 36 comments