Holy crap. Someone won the Texas Lotto -- to the tune of $95 million -- by buying every combination of number available. They apparently invested approximately $25.8M to accomplish that. (Paywall busted below) https://archive.is/etkX9
So I wanted to post a question about a #math problem, and I wanted to reach the widest possible math community on the #Fediverse. Aside from using the correct tag, my first thought was to find a #Lemmy or #kbin community/magazine to cc in the post. And … there isn't one. There's many. Just from a quick search I found https://lemmy.ml/c/mathematics https://lemmy.ml/c/math https://kbin.social/m/math
so now the question becomes … should I cross post to all of them? Or is that poor form?
This may very well be the most useless book I have ever written, and I don't even know why I did. I guess it is still better than getting drunk in a bar.
Anyway, it defines the #T3X programming language formally in terms of basic functions (zero, successor, identity, mu) and naive set theory. I have no idea why anybody would read such a book. Maybe you can give me some hints? :)
Or, in case you want to prove me wrong: http://t3x.org/t3x/0/formal.html #programming, #semantics, #math, #futility
I’ve finished doing perspective corrections on 250 photos of NHCP #HistoricalMarkers! 🎉 I have been doing this sort of photo editing on and off since 2017 and this is in support of the historical markers @wikidata /Commons project I and a few others are working on (e.g., my Panandâ mobile app).
Generating the mosaic image in my previous toot was an interesting micro-coding project. I conjectured but didn't expect that it was possible to arrange photos of varying sizes into a near square. I just used a naïve randomized heuristic to essentially solve a variation of the bin packing problem¹ and the results turned out to be good enough™ though obviously not rigorously optimal. Thanks also to the MediaWiki Action API!
The other day my kid asks me to present math problems about area. Early middle school: simple multiplications and divisions. He got taught a formula for areas of trapezoids: A = 1/2h * (b1 + b2).
I decided to show him how to #unittest his #math solution, by giving him a different approach: A = a + 2b, where a = area of the square, and b = area of each triangle on the sides of that square.
He threw a fit and refused to accept my approach, because it wasn’t the same as he had learned.
1000000000000066600000000000001 is a prime, a palindrome, and named after a prince of Hell, Belphegor, due to the 666 in the middle and 13 zeros on either side. Fun sidenote, it's represented with the symbol for Pi - but upside down.
Mathematicians sometime talk about algebra and geometry being dual to each other. One way to formalise this is by talking about opposite categories. If the objects of a category act like algebras, then in the opposite category they act like spaces.
But the category of finite dimensional vector spaces is its own opposite! This suggests that linear algebra is in some sense the place where algebra and geometry meet. Perhaps that explains why it's so tractable and efficacious.