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# Posts

### December 21, 2014

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We are pleased to upload the Mathematical Sciences question papers for SET 2014, conducted by SLET Commission, Assam.   Paper I Paper II Paper III   [The member state of the Commission are Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur, Sikkim and Tripura.]
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Last week’s post on “Coding Christmas” has been very popular; my personal favourite use of Scratch is to demonstrate relationships between angles and polygons which I have written on before. Investigating more projects on Scratch I found What’s My Number? which could make … Continue reading →
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Diederik Stapel’s book, “Ontsporing” has been translated into English, with some modifications. From what I’ve read, it’s interesting in a bizarre, fraudster-porn sort of way. Faking Science: A true story of academic fraud Diederik Stapel Translated by Nicholas J.L. Brown Nicholas J. L. Brown (nick.brown@free.fr) Strasbourg, France December 14, 2014 Foreword to the Dutch edition […]
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Quando non ti ricordi cosa c'è dopo l'uno, il tre è molto lontano Fred (d'Alembert) Bene, sembra siate passati attraverso moltiplicazione e divisione senza eccessivi traumi. Ancora un passettino, dai: carta & matita. Calcolate la radice quadrata di duecentosessantaquattro. Sino al secondo decimale. Non ditemi che non vi ricordate... Incredibile! Già, anche in età più tarda ci si scontra con [...]
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Retour sur les triangles de Steinhaus équilibrés et le problème de Molluzzo … - Les conjectures du trimestre / Piste rouge, featured
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Long time ago, I talked about conformal changes for various geometric quantities on a given Riemannian manifold of dimension , see this post. Frequently used in conformal geometry in general, or when solving the prescribed scalar curvature equation in particular, is the conformal Laplacian, defined as follows where is the scalar curvature of the metric […]
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Today's insights go in different directions. The first one came in large part from a remark by John Platt on  Technet's Machine Learning blog who puts this into words much better than I ever could....Given the successes of deep learning, researchers are trying to understand how they work. Ba and Caruana had a NIPS paper which showed that, once a deep network is trained, a shallow network can learn the same function from the outputs of the deep network. The shallow network can’t learn […]
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I have given you a lot of gift ideas for Christmas (Christmas Presents, for her, for him, for children), but I thought that it would be a good idea to do a DIY. Also, this is not a really maths … Continue reading →
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In conclusion, teaching has a writing problem.Part of the problem, I've been arguing, is that in education we talk about the wrong things. We talk about concepts that don't get at the heart of classroom teaching -- concepts like feedback -- and so we ask questions that are impossible to answer. As a consequence, these questions -- like how do you give effective feedback? -- are very difficult to respond to. They require the ability to split hairs and to generalize. Academic researchers and […]
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curiosamathematica: Last week my follower count hit 10.000. Which is simply amazing. When I started this blog one and a half years ago, I would never have believed it would grow to be this popular. So, let me start with a big THANK YOU to all my amazing followers! To celebrate this milestone, I would like to organize some mathematical giveaway. First, what can you win? Well, a signed edition of this delightful new book of Matt Parker, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension! I bought the […]
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The following open letter in support of the autonomy of the universities of the Republic of Macedonia was originally drafted by Todd May for the purposes of being circulated and gaining additional signatories. It is being published here with the names of its current subscribers. Those who wish to add...
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Home Fires in Possum TrotIn his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (Hermite, 1822-1901) could say without exaggeration, 'Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.' Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, 'By studying the masters, not the pupils.'~Eric Temple BellThe 355th day of the […]

### December 20, 2014

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Filed under: Kids, pictures, University life Tagged: All of Statistics, central limit theorem, introductory textbooks, t-test, Université Paris Dauphine
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In preparing for 2015, I asked for your help the other day. Thanks for entertaining my hunch.Here are the questions and results (from 65 people):Question: What are the joys of a photocopier?You had many great things to share about the efficiency of providing your students with copies and some of the detailed functions of the machine. An interesting number of you find joy in the warmth of the copies (I'll admit, me too). Some of you veteran teachers shared how you appreciate the evolution […]
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[Featured Image (above) by Math Giraffe, and Math Goggles image (right) by Moebius Noodles — two great posts from this month’s carnival.] Number sense, measurement, place value, functions, calculus for kids, Christmas math activites, art, and much more — check … Continue reading →
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An old top hit from the 70's... a clip of I Will Survive!, originally by Gloria Gaynor, here sung by Cheryl & my favorite group 24K Gold Music. Lots of energy!
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In parallel with the stuff about chemlambda, described in the first half, there was something else happening. I prepared some noted for a talk at the 4th Offtopicarium, in the form of a post here: Notes for the “Internet of things not internet of objects” The starting point is that what almost everybody describes as … Continue reading A year review at chorasimilarity, second half →
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12 Days of Christmas is a card game designed by Dr. Gord Hamilton of Math Pickle. It’s designed for 2-8 players, ages 8+, to be played in 20-30 minutes. Simple enough for the whole family to play, yet strategic enough … Continue reading →
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"Εάν μπόρεσα να δω πιο μακριά, είναι γιατί στεκόμουν πάνω σε ώμους γιγάντων."                    […]
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In 1946, Ulam, in response to a theorem of Anning and Erdös, posed the following problem: Problem 1 (Erdös-Ulam problem) Let be a set such that the distance between any two points in is rational. Is it true that cannot be (topologically) dense in ? The paper of Anning and Erdös addressed the case that […]
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Comic book cover Electric Warrior, N11   http://im-possible.info/english/art/covers/magazine-electric-warrior.html
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Un esquema bien clasificado y ordenado sobre modos de dibujar, que no me resisto a publicar. A simple slideshow showcasing some line drawing techniques with a focus on the work of Vincent Van Gogh & Albrecht Durer. en presentación linedrawingthecniques. http://curkovicartunits.pbworks.com/w/page/11306896/%22Make%20You%20Mark%22%20-%20Line%20Drawings … Sigue leyendo →
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Filed under: Wines Tagged: Chianti Rufina, Firenze, Frescobaldi Castello di Nipozzano Montesodi, Italia, Marchesi de' Frescobaldi, Montesodi, Tuscany
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Last Wednesday I gave a talk about the Partition Principle in our students seminar. This talk covered the historical background of the oldest open problem in set theory, and two proofs that for a long time I avoided learning. I promised to post a summary of the talk here. So here it is. The historical […]
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\( \eqalign{ & 4\sqrt {4 - p} - \frac{1} {3}\left( {\sqrt {4 - p} } \right)^3 - p\sqrt {4 - p} = \frac{8} {3} \cr & Neem\,\,q = \sqrt {4 - p} \cr & Er\,\,geldt:p = 4 - q^2 \cr & 4q - \frac{1} {3}q^3 - \left( {4 - q^2 } \right) \cdot q = \frac{8} {3} \cr & 4q - \frac{1} {3}q^3 - 4q + q^3 = \frac{8} {3} \cr & \frac{2} {3}q^3 = \frac{8} {3} \cr & 2q^3 = 8 \cr & q^3 = 4 \cr & q = \root 3 \of 4 \cr & p = 4 - \left( {\root 3 \of 4 } \right)^2 = 4 - […]
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Just mirroring a post from the other blog. Here is an IPython notebook with an implementation of the linear percepton algorithm. Details will follow in another post and I give a general idea of what it does in the notebook but here is what the picture looks like. Assuming that you have a set of […]
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Originally posted on Chinoiseries 《汉瀚》:从来没有状元的老师, 却能培养出状元学生。中国历史的状元, 都是在科举失败的穷秀才教导出来的。看今日的Fields Medalists / Nobel Prize winners, 他们的指导教授多数没拿过这大奖。 法国有两位世界级的数学大师Evariste Galois, Charles Hermite,  相隔15年,同是一位中学数学老师培养。Mr. Richard  是巴黎路易大帝中学(Lycée Louis Le Grand) 的数学老师, […]
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Sun, the brightest object of our solar system, is the primary energy source of our life, in fact for any living organism. Sun is considered to be the central object of our solar system that holds all the planets and their moons together. The day begins with beautiful sunshine and ends with reddish sky at
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I will also come back to some of the videos and slides of this workshop on Spectral Algorithms: From Theory to Practice organized at the Simons Institute at Berkeley. But in the meantime here are the links to pages that generally feature both the slides and the videos (and sometimes none of the two).  Topic Modeling: A Provable Spectral Method,  Ravi Kannan, Microsoft Research India Exact Recovery via Convex Relaxations, Moses Charikar, Princeton University The Impact […]
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Singapore made world cup history this year, well sort of. In probably the most embarrassing way possible. Before the kickoffs in June, the National Council for Problem Gambling (with the best of intentions no doubt) developed this advertisement to dissuade hardcore punters from squandering all their money away:Then in the finals, German striker Mario Gotze made Argentinian fans weep with a single extra-time goal, and the boy's dad rich beyond his wildest dreams. So gambling does pay off […]