October 04, 2006

links, links, links

Cool free math books:

Fascinating New Yorker article about the people involved in the solution to the Poincare conjecture. And in case you want to know more about the Poincare conjecture, you can follow James Tauber on his Poincare Project.

A coworker gave me this link to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky's home page with some great pieces to read. My favorite is his Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning.

Posted by Uwe Hoffmann at 10:24 AM

February 05, 2006

fingertrees and packrat parsers

Got these from the scala mailing list: interesting functional programming algorithms (scala enthusiasts are porting them over from haskell)

Finger Trees: A Simple General-purpose Data Structure

Bryan Ford. Packrat Parsing: a Practical Linear-Time Algorithm with Backtracking. Master's Thesis, MIT, 2002.

Posted by Uwe Hoffmann at 11:04 PM

November 21, 2005

nadia

This blog has just hired a new editor-in-chief Nadia.
She started Oct. 15th (7.2 lb and 20.5 inches) and has already had a positive impact on the site: the blog has been upgraded to mt 3.2, the photos slideshow page has a new thumbnail viewer on the right side when viewing albums, the papers section has a new entry and the blog links sidebar has been cleaned up and has a couple of new additions. But even Nadia admits in a recent interview with "Blog Editors-In-Chief Magazine" that unless she hires new staff writers not much content will come to this blog in the next couple of months.

So in the meantime here's another edition of "piles of cool stuff". A lot of time has passed since the last edition so many cool things accumulated on the observer desk but unfortunately a lot of things were also lost again because they were not recorded right away. What remains is:

  • Eric Hehner's "A Practical Theory of Programming" is now available online for free.
  • If you understand Spanish here is another cool book about program calculus and algorithm derivation available online for free.
  • If you study or teach linear algebra this paper has a very modern example of how wonderfully applicable math is: linear algebra is behind the Google search engine's power to do relevance ranking. The paper is very well written with clear explanations, descriptive examples and exercises. Simply excellent.
Posted by Uwe Hoffmann at 09:27 PM

April 24, 2005

piles of cool stuff

  • Online book Numerical Computing with Matlab is an excellent introductory course in numerical methods with real world examples like Google's PageRank algorithm in the linear algebra chapter or touch-tone dialing in the fourier analysis chapter. Uses Matlab as its computing platform.
  • You can use Octave, an open source alternative to Matlab to run the m-files from the Numerical Computing with Matlab book.
  • Mathematics of Program Construction is a collection of papers by Roland Backhouse, a champion of program calculations and derivations of algorithms. To get an idea read an inaugural lecture and for an example of the power of the mathematical approach consider the use of regular algebras to derive graph algorithms.
Posted by Uwe Hoffmann at 09:21 PM

November 04, 2004

piles of cool stuff

First off Google and their recruiting methods. This is old news but I want to have it here for the record. Our favorite cool company is using unusual methods to attract talent. It started in the summer with the billboard on 101.

Then in September Google Labs released the GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test). Yours truly was delusional enough to go cherry pick one of the problems in there and try solve it. I went for the geometry one (number 16). Of course I spent a couple of weekends in vain but I enjoyed the effort because I revisited all that long ago forgotten geometry material. When you're done with your GLAT solutions you can compare notes with the Mathematica guys.


What else is in the pile ? A couple of cool links:

  • Combinatorics Through Guided Discovery is a great Combinatorics text book that presents the material through targeted exercises that let the reader discover it just like a true mathematician (a gently guided mathematician).
  • This page by John Kennedy has a nice collection of introductory notes on pretty diverse mathematical subjects from modular arithmetic for the RSA algorithm to Bezier curves to the math modeling a lense to the number e and compound interest
  • W. D. Joyner's notes on the Mathematics of the Rubik's cube.
  • Three collections of online mathematics books and lecture notes: one, two and three.

And last but not least Delicious Monster with their soon to be released


Delicious Library


has been getting a lot of buzz. Personally I think it will be great to let my collection of books parade in front of my iSight producing a nice XML database that maybe, just maybe can somehow be turned into a bibtex file.

Posted by Uwe Hoffmann at 12:17 AM

January 25, 2004

links

Posted by Uwe Hoffmann at 09:53 PM