christianp

fabriek, 10 days ago to random

TIL that fascists in Argentina in the 70s were so threatened by math and logic they at one point banned venn diagrams

alicemcalicepants, 14 days ago to random

THIS. This is why 'I don't want to put a label on my child' is harmful. If you don't know you're not neurotypical, you end up thinking it's a personal failing that you don't fit in/keep up, and that you're not trying hard enough even though you've been trying hard all your life.

Neurodivergent Kids Flourish When They're Taught How Their Brains Work - Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neurodivergent-kids-flourish-when-theyre-taught-how-their-brains-work/

numbas, 16 days ago to random

Here's the recording of the talk Christian gave at JISC #ConnectMore24, "Rich interactive assessment of STEM subjects with Numbas"
https://vimeo.com/950997218

henryseg, 18 days ago to random

New video about wild knots:
https://youtu.be/o7U3yvMF8Sw

mina, 19 days ago to random German

Limited audience:

(author unknown - from "Memes for #Math" @ Telegram)

ZachWeinersmith, 20 days ago to comics

Mathematics

The shocking bonus panel is available here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/mathematics-2

#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #math

highergeometer, 20 days ago to random

Hooley dooley.

This post is about a "found-in-the-wild" small Turing machine (3-states, 4-symbols), that halts --- after an Ackermann function-level number of steps:
[ 14 \uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow 14
]
and in fact we know exactly how many!

https://www.sligocki.com//2024/05/22/bb-3-4-a14.html

NanoRaptor, 21 days ago to random

What are some numbers in your field that anyone else in the field would identify without even thinking about it, but folk outside may have no idea. Just the numbers, no explanations. Yet.

105 148 210 297 420 594 841 1189

samwho, 22 days ago to random

✨ I spent 3 months writing the best interactive introduction to queueing I could, and it's live now!

You can read it here: https://encore.dev/blog/queueing.

It starts off by showing what happens when you have no queue...

A screenshot from the post. It shows the first visualisation, an orange circular button on the left and a black rounded square on the right. The button is clicked, and a request travels to the black square, the server, and gets processed by slowly disappearing in a clock-like fashion.

br00t4c, 22 days ago to random

Chris Mason: Election speculation feels different this time

#election

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-69048696

numbas, 22 days ago to math

Next month we're running a couple of training sessions and we're also trying a new drop-in session for anyone who wants to talk about Numbas.

The sessions are free and open to anyone with an interest in Numbas.

There's more information and links to register on the blog: https://www.numbas.org.uk/blog/2024/05/numbas-training-sessions-and-drop-in-hours-june-2024/

#Numbas #eAssessment #assessment #math #maths

MotivicKyle, 22 days ago to random

Today I learned that John Milnor wrote a limerick in which Christos Dimitriou Papakyriakopoulos's name spans three lines!

aws, 26 days ago to random

Church's thesis is the anti-classical axiom that all functions ℕ→ℕ are computable. Here's an equivalent statement that doesn't explicitly mention computable functions: every countably presented group embeds in a finitely presented group.

alex, 27 days ago to random

"average british person earns enough money to be alive" actually just statistical error. taxcuts georg, who lives in belize and makes £10,000,000 per second is an outlier and should not have been counted

christianp, 27 days ago to random

Someone in the @TMiP WhatsApp group told me about a TikTok game where you're shown a sequence of five numbers, and have to guess what order they go in.

I've made my own version of it: https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/number-order-game/

"Order those numbers! You'll be shown five numbers, between 100 and 999. Try to guess what order the numbers will go in, from smallest to biggest." I'm shown 995, 164, 706, 576 and 227, and place them in 5th, 1st, 4th, 3rd and 2nd positions. Then it says "You did it!"

dpiponi, 28 days ago to random

When I first came across Voigtländer's paper on speeding up free monads [1] and some of the methods that Hinze mentions [2] I was a bit bemused about why category theory had anything to say about program optimization. But now it seems obvious. Much of optimization is a lot like algebraic manipulation where you're rearranging while hoping to keep the value the same. But in particular, a really common optimization move is to write f(g(x)) as (fg)(x) where (fg) is somehow simpler (or more reusable than) than just applying g then f. Ie. associativity - which is one of the laws of category theory. I think this step also accounts for almost all of the computational reasons for using linear algebra. Eg. graphics pipelines make good use of this kind of associativity.

[1] https://janis-voigtlaender.eu/papers/AsymptoticImprovementOfComputationsOverFreeMonads.pdf
[2] https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ralf.hinze/Kan.pdf

stecks, 28 days ago to random

Want to come and see me do a talk about maths in Manchester? Next month I'll be speaking at the uni on 17th June: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/universityofmanchester11/1213624

johncarlosbaez, 29 days ago (edited 29 days ago) to random

Fun article by John Psmith featuring some ferociously competitive mathematicians and physicists. A quote:

.....

In the 1696 edition of Acta Eruditorum, Johann Bernoulli threw down the gauntlet:

"I, Johann Bernoulli, address the most brilliant mathematicians in the world. Nothing is more attractive to intelligent people than an honest, challenging problem, whose possible solution will bestow fame and remain as a lasting monument. Following the example set by Pascal, Fermat, etc., I hope to gain the gratitude of the whole scientific community by placing before the finest mathematicians of our time a problem which will test their methods and the strength of their intellect. If someone communicates to me the solution of the proposed problem, I shall publicly declare him worthy of praise.

Given two points A and B in a vertical plane,
what is the curve traced out by a point acted on only by gravity,
which starts at A and reaches B in the shortest time."

This became known as the brachistochrone problem, and it occupied the best minds of Europe for, well, for less time than Johann Bernoulli hoped. The legend goes that he issued that pompous challenge I quoted above, and shortly afterward discovered that his own solution to the problem was incorrect. Worse, in short order he received five copies of the actually correct solution to the problem, supposedly all on the same day. The responses came from Newton, Leibniz, l’Hôpital, Tschirnhaus, and worst of all, his own brother Jakob Bernoulli, who had upstaged him yet again.

(1/2) (The fun part about Newton comes in part 2.)

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-variational-principles

Floppy, 29 days ago to random

I want a really simple key/value data store, which I can write to with a REST API call. Would you create a simple REST API wrapper around something like Redis/Valkey, or would you just expose the datastore directly? Or is there a really simple service that I can build something like that in? I actively want to avoid anything fancy or powerful, the fewer features the better.

SeanJones, 30 days ago to random

Sunak’s great plan for the UK is to turn it into a research and innovation powerhouse by deterring foreign students from coming to the universities whose ability to research and innovate depends on their fee income.

allendowney, 30 days ago to random

From Probably Overthinking It -- the longevity of dogs is one Simpson's paradox nested inside another:

1. Across all species, larger animals live longer
2. Across dog breeds, smaller breeds live longer
3. Within a breed, larger individuals live longer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/science/dogs-longevity-health.html?unlocked_article_code=1.r00.lG6A.-kTTSwpukOBV&smid=url-share

christianp, 1 month ago to random

Something I don't get about #eduroam is that I'm typing my own password into a wireless access point controlled by another university.
Is it just inertia that has prevented it from moving to a web-based SSO process where I log in to my own university's website, and they pass a signed token on to the institution I'm connecting to eduroam from?

tk, 1 month ago to random

tao, 1 month ago to random

Jim Simons, who was a noted differential geometer (for instance being one of the discoverers of Chern-Simons theory), then a successful hedge fund manager, and finally a major philanthropist to mathematics and the sciences, died today, aged 86: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/business/dealbook/jim-simons-dead.html .

One can debate whether the economic model of first encouraging the concentration of wealth by billionaires, and then relying on such billionaires for philanthropy, is the most effective or just mechanism for creating public goods, but certainly Jim made some very important investments in the modern infrastructure of mathematics and science, with his foundation being a significant funder of the arXiv for instance, and of major institutes such as the SLMath institute (formerly MSRI). I was also fortunate to be supported by a Simons Investigator Award for over a decade, which in turn supported a large number of research activities of my group here at UCLA.

I only interacted with Simons a few times (we were both on the SLMath Board of Trustees, but our interactions were almost entirely via Zoom), but he came across as sincere in his support of the sciences, and I hope the Simons Foundation will continue that support in the future.