Maths Blogs

I just found a really cool list of mathematical blogs by academics on Hacker News. I apologize for the several week lull since my last post.

Learn Maths Online

I have spoken to a lot of people who’d like to be able to improve their maths skills from home online, and have decided to try and create a pool of useful free online maths education resources. Here we go:

• MathTV.com – This site has lots of helpful short video lessons split into 4 main sections: basic maths, algebra, trigonometry and calculus. It also has a ‘textbook’ feature, essentially a sequence of videos for learning a given area. For example, an algebra ‘textbook’  is a series of progressive videos, which build on each other and attempt to slowly increase your algebraic ability.
• MathForum.org – Ask Dr Math on The Math Forum has a large archive of educational maths materials. For example, doing a quick search for “fractions” led me to a great “Converting Fractions, Decimals, and Percents” explanation.
• That Quiz – Although this site isn’t solely for maths, (it has small amounts of vocabulary, geography and science educational material too), it does mainly focus on maths, and provides good interactive tests for 20 basic maths topics.
• Jimmy R’s Speed Math Trainer – This site allows you to give your mental arithmetic skills a serious boost. Perhaps the main attraction is the Speed Maths flash application, which manages to make mental arithmetic strangely addictive. There is also a list of tips and tricks for increasing the speed and complexity of mental calculations you can perform.
• Standard Google Plug – You probably hear it about eighteen times a day, and you certainly already know, but Google is great for finding stuff. Maths resources are no exception, and if you know what you want to learn you can make your search terms pretty specific. Just try searching for something like ‘fraction tutorials’ or ‘free online algebra lessons’ and I’m sure you’ll find something. If you find anything really good, let me know.

This list is more than likely work in progress. Hope it’s helpful.

Maths and Computer Science Puzzles

Today I came across Gurmeet Singh Mankus blog, which contains a really good set of mathematical / computational puzzles and solutions:

go check them out here

Also, he has an interesting selection of computer science related posts here, as well as some other interesting stuff, so I encourage you to explore his blog.

Free Stanford Engineering Courses

“For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world.” It just so happens that three of the courses currently available are on areas of artificial intelligence:

• Introduction to Robotics
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning

There is lots of other good stuff as well, for example I have been watching a great course on Linear Dynamical Systems. Each of the courses is a set of 20 75 minute lectures (that’s a total of 25 hours per course), so there is a LOT of material here. All of the lectures I have watched so far have been well presented, and expertly explained, so this really is a great source of information. Check out the main page here.

This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics

This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics is a not quite weekly column on mathematical physics by John Baez. It is currently on week 276, and so there’s a massive back catalogue of interesting articles available to read. If you are not overly into maths and/or physics then a) you should be, and b) you can be, as his site has a guide for those who want to know how to learn maths and physics. If you would rather turn your computer off and throw it out the window than learn any maths, you can still check out John’s fun stuff page, which contains some interesting material about neither maths nor physics.

If you are still not satisfied, John Baez has also produced the crackpot index, “A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics” which is somewhere inbetween the two extreams.

Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Bellow is a link to a recording of a lecture titled “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” given by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus from the department of physics at The University of Colorado, which has been uploaded under the title: “The Most Important Video You’ll Ever See”, and even though that might not be the case, this video is certainly worth watching:

Arithmetic, Population and Energy by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett (run-time: approx 80 mins, consists of 8 parts)

In the lecture Dr. Bartlett argues that “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”.

The Drunkard’s Walk

Below is the link to a talk on randomness by physicist Leonard Mlodinow, which mainly focuses on the contents of his book of the same name:

“The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives” (runtime 56:57)  (T3)

(For some reason the talk didn’t seem to work for me in firefox, so I had to switch to IE, (well, an IE tab), so if you are having issues getting the video to play this might be one possible solution.) The talk is interesting, and includes many real life examples. It concludes with some discussion of the Monty Hall problem and a seemingly paradoxical ‘two children’ puzzle.

The talk is accompanied by slides, which can be synced with the video.

Kolmogorov complexity and Irrationality

Two cool things for today:

First of all, check this 19 minute video on irrationality:

Dan Ariely: Tendencies of Irrational Behaviour

Now note 2 things:

1. That video was really cool.

2. I linked to a blog that had a post containing this video, rather than the video itself. This might seem foolish, but in fact, it’s a two birds with one stone scenario. Firstly, you can now go check out FORA.TV, where the video lives,  a site I just found that seems to be full up to the back teeth with interesting videos, and secondly, you can check out Max F Dama’s blogs (of which he has TWO), both of which seem really interesting: his personal and opinion blog, and his Automated Trading blog.

Secondly, here’s a really interesting  wikipedia page:

Kolmogorov complexity

So I totally advise you read it, or book mark it under ‘really interesting’.