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From Computational Complexity

A new largest prime found!

A new largest KNOWN prime has been discovered and its 23 million digits long. Nate Silver's website had an article about it (written by Oliver Roeder) here An...

From Computational Complexity

Which of these Math acronyms are well known?

The last time I taught Grad Ramsey Theory there were very good math grads and ugrads in it. They used some acronyms - some I knew, some I didn't know (but knowthis...

From Computational Complexity

Monkey First!

The following story is not true nor has anyone claimed its true, but it has a point: A company gets a contract to do the following: train a monkey to sit on a ...

From Computational Complexity

Interesting Probability on a VERY OLD TV show

I have posted about things I see in TV or Movies that are math or CS related: Do TV shows overestimate how much a genius can help solve crimes or make really good...

From Computational Complexity

Fireside chat with Simons Inst Director Dick Karp

Fireside chat with Dick Karp Above link is Samir Khuller interviewing Dick Karp, though its labelled as a fireside chat with Dick Karp. Very interesting...

From Computational Complexity

Van der Waerden's theorem implies the infinitude of the primes

(Sam Buss and Denis Hirschfeld helped me on this post.) I was reading the table of contents of the American Math Monthly and saw an article by Levent Alpoge entitled...

From Computational Complexity

Can you measure which panagrams are natural

A Pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet The classic is:                                        The quick brown fox jumped over thehere...

From Computational Complexity

The two fears about technology- one correct, one incorrect

When the luddites smashed loom machines their supporters (including Lord Byron, Ada Lovelaces father) made two arguments in favor of the luddites (I am sure IWeapons...

From Computational Complexity

The k=1 case is FUN, the k=2 case is fun, the k\ge 3 case is... you decide.

 (All of the math in this post is in here.) The following problem can be given as a FUN recreational problem to HS students or even younger: (I am sure that many...

From Computational Complexity

Open: PROVE the pumping and reductions can't prove every non-reg lang non-reg.

Whenever I post on regular langs, whatever aspect I am looking at, I get a comment telling me that we should stop proving the pumping lemma (and often ask me to...

From Computational Complexity

Reductions between formal languages

Let EQ = {w : number of a's = number of b's } Let EQO = { anbn : n ∈  N} (so its Equal and in Order) Typically we do the following: Prove EQO is not regular...

From Computational Complexity

Michael Cohen

When I first saw posts about Michael Cohen (see here, here, here) I wondered is that the same Michael Cohen who I knew as a HS student? It is.  I share one memory...

From Computational Complexity

Is the Textbook Market doomed?

STORY ONE: I always tell my class that its OKAY if they don't have the latest edition of the textbook, and if they can find it a  cheap, an earlier edition (often...

From Computational Complexity

Science fiction viewers used to embrace diversity (or did they) and now they don't (or do they)

(This post is inspired by the choice of a female to be the next Doctor on the TV show Dr. Who. Note that you can't say `the next Dr. Who will be female' since Dr...

From Computational Complexity

Acronyms and PHP

Whenever I teach discrete math and use FML to mean Formula the students laugh since its a common acroynm for  Fuck My Life. Now they laugh, and I say I know why...

From Computational Complexity

A problem I thought was interesting- now...

On Nate Silver's page he sometimes (might be once a week) has a column edited by Oliver Roeder of problems. Pretty much math problems though sometimes not quite...

From Computational Complexity

The Scarecrow's math being wrong was intentional

In 2009 I had a post about Movie mistakes (see here). One of them was the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz after he got a Diploma (AH- but not a brain) he said The...

From Computational Complexity

Statistics on my dead cat policy- is there a correlation?

When I teach a small (at most 40) students I often have the dead-cat policy for late HW: HW is due on Tuesday. But there may be things that come up that don't ...

From Computational Complexity

either pi is algebraic or some journals let in an incorrect paper!/the 15 most famous transcendental numbers

Someone has published three papers claiming that π is 17 -sqrt(3) which is really =3.1435935394... Someone else has published eight papers claiming π is (14...

From Computational Complexity

What is unusual about this MIT grad student in Applied Math?

(Thanks to Rachel Folowoshele for bringing this to my attention) John Urschel is a grad student in applied math at MIT. His webpage is here. Some students gohere...
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