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God plays dice
Personal blog · gottwurfelt.commathscience
God plays dice is a personal blog at gottwurfelt.com about math and science. Since 2014, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “How many pieces can a puzzle have?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-09, and you can follow it by feed.
A mathematician blogs.
Most-linked posts?
- How many pieces can a puzzle have?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-18
What Hacker News says?
Read through comments to see if this point was made, thank you. This is so well understood there’s even a joke about it re: drivers that everyone “gets” even while knowing it doesn’t apply to them. But to your point, look at the slope in the second chart here, “Histogram of subjective ranks”: https://gottwurfelt.com/2012/02/28/why-everyone-thinks-theyr... Compare to DK slope…
Comment linking /2012/02/28/why-everyone-thinks-theyre-above-average-following-schelling/
on “I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation””Submitted How many pieces can a puzzle have? as a story · 105 points
HN discussionAnd it turns out that the reason a Euro is roughly a dollar is because it's the successor to the ECU, which was the successor to something called the European Unit of Account, which was originally defined to be a dollar's worth of gold. (I figured this out when I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole last month: https://gottwurfelt.com/2022/07/16/why-is-a-euro-close-to-a-...
Comment linking /2022/07/16/why-is-a-euro-close-to-a-dollar/
on “Euro falls below parity with the dollar”Submitted Explaining banding in a scatterplot of Goldbach’s function as a story · 27 points
HN discussionHere's how to fit twelve circular muffins on a circular plate: https://gottwurfelt.com/2020/12/27/applied-circle-packing-2/
Comment linking /2020/12/27/applied-circle-packing-2/
on “Erich's Packing Center”Submitted What’s the probability that a random n-digit palindrome is divisible by 11? as a story · 19 points
HN discussionMost large numbers can't be factored into nearly equal factors, if we take "nearly equal" to mean "differ by less than a factor of two". I called these "puzzle numbers" because they're reasonable numbers of pieces for a jigsaw puzzle to have, and wrote about it a couple years ago: https://gottwurfelt.com/2020/08/17/how-many-pieces-can-a-puz... For example you could have a 299-piece puzzle (13 by 23) or a 300-piece p…
Comment linking /2020/08/17/how-many-pieces-can-a-puzzle-have/
on “Factoring composite numbers into nearly equal factors”Submitted Tied elections as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted A temperature puzzle as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Clustering of bigram frequencies as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted A New Year’s time zone puzzle as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What proportion of months contain parts of six calendar weeks? (2012) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Random sums of sines and random walks as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Election forecasting and big data as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
