Top all-time · #11791
Nicolas James Marks Ford
Personal blog · nicf.net/articles · on HN as nicfmathscience
Nicolas James Marks Ford's personal blog at nicf.net covers math and science. Since 2017, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nicolas James Marks Ford's posts for physics explainers, such as entropy and statistical mechanics, and a thread on tethered accelerating rockets in special relativity.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog about math by Nic Ford
What Hacker News says?
As it does in physics! "which parameters [thermodynamic variables] you know" ~ "which parameters [thermodynamic variables] you hold fixed" (or know in average, like the energy for a system in a heat bath where the temperature is fixed) https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/theory.1.pdf http://nicf.net/articles/thermodynamics-statistical-mechanic...
Comment linking /articles/thermodynamics-statistical-mechanics/
on “It took me 10 years to understand entropy”Submitted Physics for Mathematicians – Introduction as a story · 233 points
HN discussion(Looks like I can no longer edit my last message, so including this as a separate reply.) You've successfully nudged me into making a PayPal donation link, which you can find right here: https://nicf.net/donate/ . I do very much appreciate the kind words.
Comment linking /donate/
on “Physics for Mathematicians – Introduction”Submitted Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics as a story · 77 points
HN discussionHi, this is the author. I've been coming back to this project off and on over the past few years but I often think of these articles as mostly something I'm writing for myself, so I'm really happy to see that some other people might be getting something out of them! I'd definitely love to hear if anyone knows anything I got wrong or can think of a way any particular explanation might be made better. I should also ta…
Comment linking /tutoring/
on “Physics for Mathematicians – Introduction”Submitted Curvature of Polyhedra (2021) as a story · 74 points
HN discussionLocation: Berkeley, CA Remote: open for the right opportunity Willing to relocate: maybe Technologies: Worked on big projects in C++, OCaml, Python, OpenGL. I also know some C and Haskell. Résumé/CV: http://nicf.net/static/Nicolas_Ford.pdf Email: njmford@gmail.com I'm a math Ph.D. with both research and engineering experience looking for an opportunity to combine mathematical problem solving with the chance to build…
Comment linking /static/Nicolas_Ford.pdf
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2017)”I do appreciate the feedback. (And I should mention that there is a supplement to the thermodynamics article that this post is about which goes through some numerical experiments; you can see it here: https://nicf.net/articles/toy-thermodynamic/ .) I do think that this may just be a situation where the thing I made isn't the thing you wanted, which is fine, but I can say a little bit about why I made the decisions I…
Comment linking /articles/toy-thermodynamic/
on “Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics”Hi, this is the author. It's been really fun to see these articles getting a little more attention. I wanted to repeat something I said when my website was posted here a couple of weeks ago, which is that I'm a private math tutor. I've been filling up a lot more than usual lately thanks to HN, but I do still have a little space! More info here: https://nicf.net/tutoring/
Comment linking /tutoring/
on “Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics”"We are still doing Special Relativity here. Flat spacetime, no gravity." This is a superb bit of pedagogy, despite the medium, thus the submission here. It does essentially require you understand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation and/or basis-independent abstract index notation, however. The "Physics for Mathematicians" work discussed on HN recently at < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39305931 >…
Comment linking /articles/general-relativity/
on “Tethered Accelerating Rockets in Special Relativity [Thread]”
