Blogs about Mathematics

Thorben Tröbst, a student of Vijay Vazirani at UC Irvine, passed his Ph.D. defense today. Thorben joined UCI in 2019, already very knowledgeable about linear programming and related topics through a master’s degree at the …

I explored the collection and picked my top six favorite Cavallini puzzles to share with you! I hope you'll find them as captivating and delightful as I did. Whether you're gifting them or enjoying them …

I got my new MacBook Pro last Friday, and so far only two things have annoyed me. The first I got used to much faster than I thought I would, and the second I’ve turned …

What is the smallest number of points in the -dimensional (hyper)cube needed to hit every -dimensional subcube? To be clear, a subcube of dimension is obtained by fixing coordinates to some specific values and then …

Double Maths First Thing is where there area 10 kinds of people: those who understand hexadecimal, and F others. Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to share joy …

This is a piece of advice that I found myself giving to many early career researchers, students, and colleagues supervising and advising those as well. For years, actually. A mathematician, the joke says, is a …

The fourth in the series about every year of Numberphile. Videos about Klein bottles, infinity, and coin flips.

The 1986 Joint Statistical Meetings had a Data Expo where participants were given a dataset to show off visualisation approaches. The “pollen” “data” was a \(3848\times 5\) matrix purporting to be five measurements of 3848 …

(Source: St Stev, Flickr) The talking heads on TV talk shows like MSNBC and Fox News are notorious for their innumeracy. But on election night last week, they impressed me by demonstrating numbersense. Viewers have …

Roll up, roll up, roll up and welcome to the two hundred and twenty ninth Carnival of Mathematics! 229 is a prime number, and that in itself is interesting. Its the “elder” of a set …

$\newcommand\C{\mathbb{C}}$ I came up with the proof below while preparing a lecture for my complex analysis course. I learned from Sinan Gunturk that Peter Lax showed him the same proof back in 2007. Let \(O\subset\C\) …

Moshe Vardi wrote a short interesting essay “What is theoretical computer science?” (It followed by interesting posts on Facebook.) Moshe argues that Thinking of theoretical computer science (TCS) as a branch of mathematics is harmful …

October EditionI had a tough choice for my final favorite theorem from the decade 2015-2024. Runners up include Pseudodeterministic Primes and Hardness of Partial MCSP. But instead in memory of the recently departed Steven Rudich, …

November Cruise This first excerpt for November is really just the preface to 3.1. Remember, our abbreviated cruise this fall is based on my LSE Seminars in 2020, and since there are only 5, I …

Acknowledgements The code in this post is indebted (and in some cases wholly ripped off from) work by the glorious Finn Lindgren, who emailed me some code to do this probably a decade ago. Yes …

Principal Component Analysis, or PCA, is a fundamental dimensionality reduction technique using in Machine Learning. The general goal is to transform a -dimensional problem into a -dimensional one, where is smaller than . This can …

The electronic version of the latest issue of the Girls’ Angle Bulletin is now available on our website. We open with the second half of our interview with Boston University Professor of Mathematics Jennifer Balakrishnan. …

My dear wife, Kathryn Farley, just woke me this Friday the 20th from a nap with something that she said was amazing. She told me it was the top most viewed video of the entire …

The readers of this blog know know that I stay away from non-math related discussions. It’s not that I don’t have any political opinions, I just don’t think they are especially valuable or original. I …

This will be a talk for the (In)determinacy in Mathematics conference at the National University of Singapore, 20-22 November 2024 Abstract. I shall discuss the question whether we may regard determinateness of truth as flowing …