Content tagged with “math”

There are 29 item(s) tagged with “math” on this site.

Other tags used by these items: statistics, tech, business, history, programming, science, economics, philosophy, biography, critical-thinking, middle-east, azure, society, baseball, sports, health, probability, gambling, software-engineering, design, information, information-theory, complexity, node, geometry, fiction, money, investing, psychology, physics

Arabic Numbers
Section
Stuff I Looked Up
Type
Explanation
Date
December 28, 2021

“ Arabic Numbers are the common, base-10 numeric system most people in the world use: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. They’re not from Arabia specifically, but they were brought to Spain in the 900s by Arabic speakers from North Africa across the Straight of Gibraltar. ”

Bayesian
Section
Stuff I Looked Up
Type
Explanation
Date
August 25, 2023

“Thomas Bayes was a 17th century English polymath. He documented a method for statistical analysis and probability which has become core to those disciplines. In its simplest form, Bayes Theorem allows us to find the probability of an event occurring them we know the probability of multiple related…”

Bitwise Operations
Section
Stuff I Looked Up
Type
Explanation
Date
November 10, 2024

“This is a computer programming term. It refers to operations that are performed on sequences of bits, in aggregate. A byte is made up of eight bits, which can be 0 or 1. So a byte might look like this: 00011011 A bitstring (or bitpattern) is any sequence of bits – not necessarily an entire byte. A…”

Calculus
Section
Stuff I Looked Up
Type
Explanation
Date
January 16, 2025

“Calculus is the hard substance that plaque turns into if it’s not removed – otherwise known as ‘tartar.’ This is the stuff that the dental hygenist is scraping off your teeth during your visit. It can also refer to a hard mass of some kind, often one in the kidney or the bladder. The name comes…”

Cartesian
Section
Stuff I Looked Up
Type
Explanation
Date
December 21, 2022

“In general, this refers to something that can be linked back to Rene Descartes, the French scientist, famous for uttering the phrase, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ There are several scientific, mathematical, and philosophical branches that are named for Descartes: Cartesian geometry Cartesian…”

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
June 24, 2017

“A look at the profound-ness of math and why it matters. Gets a little ponderous in places, but it’s a wonderful examination of eternal rules of math which transcend numbers to logic and even philosophy. In some parts, it examines rules of logical thinking. In others, it examines how academia treats…”

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
October 9, 2017

“Lovely biography of Claude Shannon, who gave us information/communication theory. Covers his life from birth to death, in short chapters, each devoted to some aspect or time period. The longest chapter is a discussion of ‘A Mathematical Basis for Communication,’ and is one of the best summaries…”

The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
May 23, 2023

“This is literally a textbook – the author says much at the beginning. He’s a professor at the University of Michigan, and he writes about how a friend asked him to resurrect a course on statistical modeling. That course became this book. Models are ways of thinking and analyzing a subject. It’s a…”

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
April 8, 2015

“A genuinely wonderful book. Extremely readable, very informative. He does a nice job of putting statistics in context, particularly around how they can be used to manipulate questions by simply framing issues differently. I’m normally skeptical of ‘For Dummies’ style books that try to simplify…”

Nets, Puzzles, and Postmen: An Exploration of Mathematical Connections
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
November 30, 2015

“Technically, I abandoned this book, but I’m still counting it as read because I learned a lot from it. What I learned is that network theory is actually a thing. It’s a branch of mathematics. And, weirdly, a lot of the seemingly unsolvable story problems you read as a kid are actually network…”

Non-Euclidean
Section
Stuff I Looked Up
Type
Explanation
Date
May 6, 2023

“‘Non-Euclidean Geometry’ is the field of geometry as applied to non-flat surfaces and non-straight lines. Euclid was an ancient mathematician who published a work called The Elements . This laid out the basic, common principles of geometry that we know today. However, Euclid only dealt with flat,…”

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
November 25, 2015

“Throughout this book, the author keeps trying to make the phrase ‘Super Cruncher/ing/ed’ happen. I kept thinking back to the character in Mean Girls that said, ‘Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen.’ It gets distracting. And annoying. It doesn’t help that it sounds…”