Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Individuals are notoriously prone to overestimate good outcomes, underestimate bad ones. How to self-correct? Know your biases. Practise a lot. Stick to a narrow field. Assign numerical values to probabilities. Get rapid feedback
Deep dive into the cutting-edge science of folding, and its possible technological applications. "It’s a manufacturing strategy that we think is going to revolutionize everything from microelectronics to toy manufacturing"
Investigating the maths of altruism. Two part series of which this is the first. Second part linked at the end. Read both, they're worth it. (As long as you have a basic grasp of maths, and an interest in evolutionary game theory)
Sure, but how much faster? Well, Cambridge mathematician John Barrow has done some calculations and reckons that, given the right wind speed, altitude, and reaction time, Usain Bolt could finish in less than nine and a half seconds
Mixed martial arts has become one of most popular spectator sports in America. But only now is its brutal violence colliding with hard maths. It used to be last-man-standing, and all other statistics were irrelevant. No longer
Fun maths workout for those who aren't numerically inclined. And a helpful lesson in distinguishing a statistician from a mathematician. "Statistics are like bikinis–what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital"
Mathematicians and puzzlers have long been sure that it was impossible to set a solvable Sudoku puzzle with fewer than 17 initial clues. But nobody could prove it. Enter Gary McGuire, whose algorithms have done the job
Some equations are simply more important than others. Here's a reminder of seven, that enabled many of the technologies we now rely on: The wave equation, Maxwell's four equations, the Fourier transform and Schrödinger's equation
Maths professor casts his eye over infamous Black-Scholes equation, used to price complex financial derivatives. His conclusion? "The world economy desperately needs a radical overhaul and that requires more mathematics, not less"
Each year, the finest card counters in America meet secretly in Vegas to share tricks of the trade. The star attraction? Dr Edward Thorp, a 79-year-old maths professor. The godfather of card counting. This is how he rose to fame
Austrian logician Kurt Gödel proved that self-referentialism can create unanswerable questions, unsolvable problems. His work revealed paradoxes in mathematics, but it has important implications for consciousness research too
Wonderful story of Eric Lander, maths prodigy who made unusual U-turn into biology from his position teaching economics at Harvard Business School. Ended up as central figure in race to sequence human genome. An exceptional talent
