Statistical Measures
In the stats book that I used at college, A First Course in Probability (sixth ed) by Sheldon Ross, I found two problems that seem paradoxical when juxtaposed. Can you explain the opposite results? Ch 2 Axioms of Probability, Self-Test Exercise #15….
Transforming Heuristics
Many of the real problems in the world are NP. Things like Scheduling, Register Allocation, Routing packages, etc. In solving these really hard problems, we invent heuristics. Typically such heuristics are specific to the problem domain. For example, UPS might…
Speech on Chaos Theory and Ecological Stability
I wrote this speech on the way to an Academic Decathlon competition in high school. I still like it, but see now that I really should have been speaking of path lines in attractor fields. Other than that very important…
Axiom of Abortion
Recently the ever popular doughnut chain, Krispy Kreme, got in trouble for supporting our new political administration. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free…
P vs NP
We’ve reached the NP-completeness section of my Fundamental Algorithms class, and I’ve noticed something interesting about P and NP. class P NP-complete Euler tour Hamiltonian Cycle 2-SAT 3-SAT Shortest path Longest simple path We have problems from a variety of…
Probability Programming
Yesterday a very interesting speaker, Eric Hehner, gave a talk at the graduate seminar: TITLE A Probability Perspective ABSTRACT This talk could be called “probability meets programming”. It draws together four perspectives that contribute to a new understanding of probability…
Hallucinated Abstract
I actually thought this up around sometime in Feb 2007; I had been reading Sipser’s Intro to Computer Science text, and hallucinated the following abstract while drifting off to sleep: This paper presents an isomorphism between the set of problems…
Dymaxion mapping.
Ok, so I’ve been away awhile. I visited the Maker Faire, and San Deigo Amphib Base (twice). Two days ago I read Benford’s Cosm, start to finish. And learned that the nucleus of heavier elements are ellipsoidal rather than spherical….
The half-derivative
When I was in college, I once had this crazy notion of a half-derivative. We’d been taking nth-derivatives in physics, and I wondered “why stick to integers?”. Well, as it turned out, others had been there before me. At the…
Weekly Summary of Noospheric Echolocutions
This past week I finished my reading of Mandelbrot’s most recent book The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. I actually didn’t like it that much. I found the book to be especially light on details; for a mathematical empiricist Mandelbrot didn’t actually…