Top all-time · #1265
Kevin Brown
Personal blog · mathpages.commathsciencehistory
Kevin Brown writes MathPages, a personal blog at mathpages.com about math, science and history. Since 2008, 58 different Hacker News readers have linked it 91 times, most often “MathPages”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- MathPages4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-02-14
- Reflections on Relativity3 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2009-04-03
- Infinite Grid of Resistors3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-03-24
- The Newton-to-Quantum Mechanics tension between determinism and indeterminism3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-12-07
- /rr/s3-07/3-07.htm2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-11-16
- MathPages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-12-02
- Optimizing Your Wife2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-04-02
- MathPages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-19
- Piano Keys2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-28
- Infinite Grid of Resistors2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-08-02
What Hacker News says?
http://www.mathpages.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?”Submitted Infinite Grid of Resistors as a story · 215 points
HN discussionAwesome. Some concepts in math are so much easier to grasp with an interactive visual. I once made an entire game around matrix multiplication -- such that players didn't even know they learned how to do this. And sometimes, visualizations can help cause discoveries. A lot of progress in theoretical physics came about because physicists 'guessed' what nature's equations should look like...and then got shocked when t…
Comment linking /home/kmath103/kmath103.htm
on “Matrix Multiplication”Submitted Optimizing Your Wife as a story · 111 points
HN discussionhttps://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath077/kmath077.htm is a good overview of why trying to make the expansion explanation even work with Newtonian gravity ultimately leads you to general relativity.
Comment linking /home/kmath077/kmath077.htm
on “Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime”Submitted Is e Normal? as a story · 94 points
HN discussionI think your watch is slow and you think mine is slow in the following sense. For each of many events, I record their time t and position x while you, moving relative to me at constant velocity, observe a different time T and position X. Between two events with the same X-value, such as ticks of your pocket watch, the difference in t-times is larger than the difference in T-times by a factor gamma. Conversely, betwe…
Comment linking /rr/s4-07/4-07.htm
on “The Space Doctor’s Big Idea”Submitted Did Poincaré anticipate Gödel? as a story · 83 points
HN discussionNice story, however the second message he deciphered was not about Jupiter's spots, but something else. https://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath151/kmath151.htm
Comment linking /home/kmath151/kmath151.htm
on “How to prove you know a secret without giving it away”Submitted Infinite Grid of Resistors as a story · 76 points
HN discussionSure. You can start from relativity and show that for example the antisymmetric Faraday tensor (P in the link [1] below) can get you a lot of phenomena (not all the way, accelerating charges are hairy, even for Feynman, see the link [2]) To note, the reference to finding the relativistic invariant from the tensor in the first link goes back to the first edition of Landau and Lifshitz. The problem was removed from la…
Comment linking /home/kmath528/kmath528.htm
on “Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]”Submitted Piano Keys as a story · 74 points
HN discussionIf you took out the bits of relativity that were developed by others, you'd be left with not very much. Relativity without the Lorentz transform... I'm not even sure how one would resolve that. As I said, the vast majority of the insight was just taking what the math was already saying seriously. Einstein put it into a final form, and this is important and valid work, but it's not like he invented all the mathematic…
Comment linking /rr/rrtoc.htm
on “Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs”Submitted The Algebra of an Infinite Grid of Resistors as a story · 52 points
HN discussionKevin Brown's mathpages [0] are really something else. I keep falling into them again and again when trying to solve very different technical problems. Each time, he surprises me with several crucial insights that were already there 20 years ago. The wonky math equations are a lovely plus. [0] https://www.mathpages.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is the most unique website you’ve come across on the internet?”Submitted Cantor's Diagonal Proof as a story · 47 points
HN discussionGoogle knows: http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath668/kmath668.htm
Comment linking /home/kmath668/kmath668.htm
on “The Mother of All Interview Questions”Submitted Optimizing Your Wife as a story · 33 points
HN discussionThis is a metaphor breakdown because you pushed it too hard, rather than a real problem with the idea. In the ideal case you are a floating point, and you haven't got discrete parts of yourself to fling away, but of course that's an abstract step too far away for the target audience of this piece. Reflections on Relativity [1] in fact does build up to a generalize concept of relativity (not just Einsteinian relativi…
Comment linking /rr/rrtoc.htm
on “The theory of relativity in words of four letters or less”Submitted Is e Normal? as a story · 29 points
HN discussionHow to derive mathematically correct piano key widths: https://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath043.htm
Comment linking /home/kmath043.htm
on “Show HN: A piano chord reference tool”Submitted The myth of RGB: To represent all colors you'd need negative red as a story · 18 points
HN discussionA more in depth and more complete treatment: http://mathpages.com/home/kmath616/kmath616.htm
Comment linking /home/kmath616/kmath616.htm
on “Is there such a thing as half a derivative?”Submitted Feynman's Ants (speaking of experiments with animals...) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThen, I'm afraid, you're missing the point of the paradox. There are a few stories (improperly called "paradoxes") attributed to Zeno: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes You're probably thinking of The Dichotomy. This story points out that matter must not be infinitely divisible. The paired story, The Arrow, shows that a universe of finite, indivisible pieces is also impossible. Thus, Zeno's paradox. Fu…
Comment linking /rr/s3-07/3-07.htm
on “A visualization of why 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/64 + 1/256 + ... = 1/3”Submitted Can Schrodinger's Cat Factor Numbers? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHere's a well-explained article about fractional derivatives and integrals (1). One freaky outcome is that the factorials of fractional numbers can be found. (Example: negative one half factorial = square root of pi.) It can be applied to all things quantum mechanical (2) so there's a fractional Schrödinger equation etc. I had to look it up, but the links are worth the bother. (1) https://www.mathpages.com/home/kmat…
Comment linking /home/kmath616/kmath616.htm
on “Memristor – The fictional circuit element”Submitted MathPages as a story · 4 points
HN discussionNo such thing: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/14777/why-isnt-there... Get far enough into Reflection on Relativity and the author makes some interesting observations based on this tidbit: http://www.mathpages.com/rr/rrtoc.htm (But it is quite a ways in there.)
Comment linking /rr/rrtoc.htm
on “Zerocoin: making Bitcoin anonymous”Submitted The Dartboard Sequence as a story · 4 points
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