38 points by surprisetalk 12 days ago | 3 comments
Mathematical Fiction(people.charleston.edu) The Mathematical Fiction Homepage is my attempt to collect information about all significant references to mathematics in fiction.
61 points by todsacerdoti 13 days ago | 7 comments
There Is No Diffie-Hellman but Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman(keymaterial.net) When I first learned about Diffie-Hellman and especially elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman, I had one rather obvious question: Why elliptic curves? Why use this strange group that seems rather arbitrary, with its third intersection of a line and then reflected? Why not use, say, the Monster Group? Surely a monster is better equipped to guard your secrets than some curve thing named after, but legally distinct from, a completely different curve thing!
The Transwedge Product(terathon.com) Introductory texts on geometric algebra often begin by showing how the geometric product is a combination of the wedge product and the dot product, giving us the formula[1]
100 theorems in Lean(leanprover-community.github.io) Freek Wiedijk maintains a list tracking progress of theorem provers in formalizing 100 classic theorems in mathematics as a way of comparing prominent theorem provers.
Math and the Museum(wordpress.com) New York City now boasts one of the best mathematics museums in the world, the National Museum of Mathematics, informally called MoMath.
A bestiary of mathematical functions for systems designers(brunodias.dev) Whether your game surfaces its numbers to the player or not, odds are it has underlying systems that rely on them, and you use functions to determine how those numbers affect each other. In other words, a mathematical function is usually at the core of the answer to a bunch of frequent game design questions.
Cleo, the mathematician that tricked Stack Exchange(wikipedia.org) Cleo was the pseudonym of an anonymous mathematician active on the mathematics Stack Exchange from 2013 to 2015, who became known for providing precise answers to complex mathematical integration problems without showing any intermediate steps.
A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization(abstractnonsense.com) I recently went on a nice long SCUBA diving trip with my wife and daughters. Lots of diving implies lots of showers, and lots of showers means lots of shower-thoughts! [1] An especially interesting one I had turned into a nice way to visualize some aspects of the Collatz Conjecture.
What does the end of mathematics look like?(awanderingmind.blog) As a prelude to what is to follow, I must say that while I am not a professional mathematician (I have a masters degree in theoretical physics and work in the software world), I do enjoy reading the occasional textbook or review paper, and wandering through its pages in a type of reverie, like walking through a glade looking at flowers.
The World Record for the Shortest Math Article: 2 Words(openculture.com) In 2004, John Conway and Alexander Soifer, both working on mathematics at Princeton University, submitted to the American Mathematical Monthly what they believed was “a new world record in the number of words in a [math] paper.”
The most important thing to understand about queues (2016)(danslimmon.com) You only need to learn a little bit of queueing theory before you start getting that ecstatic “everything is connected!” high that good math always evokes. So many damn things follow the same set of abstract rules. Queueing theory lets you reason effectively about an enormous class of diverse systems, all with a tiny number of theorems.