Stuff happens, and people tweet about it. Something major happens, and a lot of people tweet about it. Masters student …...

I guess this will be the last post on this topic. I’ll explain a tiny bit about what goes into the proof of this theorem and then why anyone would care that such canonical lifts exist. On the first point, … Continue reading →...

Several people have asked me what kind of work I’ve been doing since I went out on my own earlier this year. So far I’ve done a lot of fairly small projects, though I have one large project that’s just…Read more ›...

David Tong argues that quantum mechanics is ultimately continuous, not discrete. In other words, integers are not inputs of the theory, as Bohr thought. They are outputs. The integers are an example of what physicists call an emergent quantity. In…Read more ›...

If something has survived this far, how much longer is it expected to survive? That’s the question answered by mean residual time. For a positive random variable X, the mean residual time for X is a function eX(t) given by…Read more ›...

From Brave New World: “But why is [Shakespeare] prohibited?” asked the Savage. … The Controller shrugged his shoulders. “Because it’s old; that’s the chief reason. We haven’t any use for old things here.” “Even when they’re beautiful?” “Particularly when they’re…Read more ›...

From Paul Dirac, 1938: Pure mathematics and physics are becoming ever more closely connected, though their methods remain different. One may describe the situation by saying that the mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while…Read more ›...

Here’s a little example of using Hadley Wickham’s testthat package for unit testing R code. You can read more about testthat here. The function below computes the real roots of a quadratic. All that really matters for our purposes is…Read more ›...

The name of my business is Singular Value Consulting, LLC. Math people may catch the allusion to singular value decomposition (SVD). I hope that non-math folks will interpret “singular value” to mean something like “singularly valuable.” One way to think…Read more ›...

If you compute the standard deviation of a data set by directly implementing the definition, you’ll need to pass through the data twice: once to find the mean, then a second time to accumulate the squared differences from the mean.…Read more ›...