Hacker News with Generative AI: Math

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.
Mathup: Easy MathML authoring tool with a quick to write syntax (mathup.xyz)
Easy MathML authoring tool with a quick to write syntax.
Napkin Math Tool (taylor.town)
Statistical Formulas for Programmers (2013) (evanmiller.org)
Being able to apply statistics is like having a secret superpower.
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:
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.
MathB.in Is Shutting Down (susam.net)
Thirteen years ago, on a quiet Saturday night, I sat down and began developing MathB.in.
Making any integer with four 2s (thegreenplace.net)
There's a cute math puzzle that can be interesting to folks on very different levels:
A simple geometry question that fools almost everyone (theguardian.com)
A triangle and a rectangle walked into a pub
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.
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:
Explorable Flexagons: Learn to create and flex flexagons (2020) (loki3.com)
Learn to create and flex flexagons
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.
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.
Why is zero plural? (2024) (stackexchange.com)
For example, if we choose two 2s, zero 3s, and one 5, we get the divisor
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.