dxbydt

Ha ha! I worked in one of these matchbox factories as a kid. My dad had dropped me off at my grandpa's for summer vacation in the village. I was not a particularly good kid. So my grandpa took me to the match factory in the morning and told me to make myself useful. You sit around in a circle on the floor. There is a small hill of matchsticks piled in front of you. You count 50 sticks and stuff them into a matchbox, push that matchbox into the center of the pile. If you stuff 100 matchboxes you get 10 paisa or some such...was in the 1970s, I don't recollect exact amount. I do remember I came out in the evening with enough money to buy a stick ice-cream.

usaco explicitly nudges you towards C++ on the first page itself. problems are graded on running time, even with moderately large datasets, Python simply doesn’t make the cut. So most high schoolers end up using C++ for usaco, and Java for AP Comp Science.

its been a long time, but when i was taught this material, i was told there are only 3 cases -

x+y=1, x+y=2 clearly has no solution since two numbers can’t simultaneously add to both one and two.

x+y=1,2x+2y=2 clearly has infinitely many solutions. There’s only one equation here after canceling the 2, so you can plug in x’s and y’s all day long, no end to it.

x+y=1, 2x+y=1 clearly has exactly one solution (0,1) after elimination.

This example stuck with me so I use it even now. The author/Claude/Gemini/whatever could have just used this simple example instead of “trichotomy of curves through space conjoin through the realm of …” math, not Shakespeare.

just to clarify - I have nothing to do with this book. I was just forwarded a copy and I thought its relevant to the topic at hand. from the wild swings in karma, looks like people are annoyed with the message and shooting down the messenger.

> best LLMs are able to accelerate you

https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~ghrist/preprints/LAEF.pdf - this math textbook was written in just 55 days!

Paraphrasing the acknowledgements -

...Begun November 4, 2024, published December 28, 2024.

...assisted by Claude 3.5 sonnet, trained on my previous books...

...puzzles co-created by the author and Claude

...GPT-4o and -o1 were useful in latex configurations...doing proof-reading.

...Gemini Experimental 1206 was an especially good proof-reader

...Exercises were generated with the help of Claude and may have errors.

...project was impossible without the creative labors of Claude

The obvious comparison is to the classic Strang https://math.mit.edu/~gs/everyone/ which took several *years* to conceptualize, write, peer review, revise and publish.

Ok maybe Strang isn't your cup of tea, :%s/Strang/Halmos/g , :%s/Strang/Lipschutz/g, :%s/Strang/Hefferon/g, :%s/Strang/Larson/g ...

Working through the exercises in this new LLMbook, I'm thinking...maybe this isn't going to stand the test of time. Maybe acceleration is not so hot after all.

aside: As the Professor points out, the ratio of pi to its evil twin is ~1.198, the arithmetic-geometric mean of sqrt(2) and 1. The geometric part involves a square root, and square roots are expensive. So I was like, well, if the AM converges to GM, then due to AM-GM-HM inequality, it must converge to the harmonic mean as well. And the HM does not need an expensive square root!

https://imgur.com/a/UkxkPzW

Its quite wild that the AM GM convergence is almost immediate - in just 2 steps, whereas to get a decent convergence for the Gauss's constant via HM, you need like 15 steps.You can dispense with expensive operators like square root but you end up paying for it with numerous iterations.

Author has computed BBMI (baby baby money index) but mistakenly calls it BMI. If he divides the BBMI by the TFR, one B goes away and you get the true BMI which is a different ranking altogether. For bonus points you can compute which country has the same ranking whether BBMI or BMI.

what an amazing turn of phrase - “reset and synchronization once the talking points get assembled” Literally describes 99 of the 100 post-jira action items coming out of the clueless PM’s mouthhole.

Amazing story. I enjoyed reading this so much. The sad fact that this was written in 1966 - like the gentleman advocated for gutting the public school system 6 decades ago, and only now we are getting around to the business of defunding the dept of education. The story has foretold everything - the culture wars, the sacred cow/buffalo, utterly divergent visions of the left and right when it comes to what education means…Rafferty seems to be a futuristic mind reader. Amazing.

You are deliberately missing the point and confusing X with ‘something that looks like X’. For eg., using QBasic, you can pick some random spot on the monitor and have a white dot show up at that spot. What you end up doing is directly writing to the vga buffer address of that spot. That’s the X. You can directly talk to LPT1 and directly get the dot matrix printer to print an ascii character. That’s the X. All these things were possible because the synergy between the hardware and the software was extreme. QBasic was just a shim. You were directly talking to the hardware in as few steps as you possibly could. The assembler code for your BAS file could be inspected and you could even muck with that.

All of that has gone out the door. What you have with javascript is something that looks like X. So I can use a html canvas element and get its drawing context and do an arc with the right parameters and fill and hide the scrollbar with some css and pretend that what you now see is like the X. But its not! To actually get rid of the browser window and only have the white dot, you would need a full blown electron install or worse. And it still wouldn’t get you to the X. We already had X. Now we have something that barely approaches X after a great deal of effort.This is supposed to be progress ?!!

> Most of the experts from that report have a direct financial benefit from claiming that this will happen

Rigetti $RGTI is up 400% this month. 135% this week alone. He’s right.

From 2022 stats: Roughly 4 million students in each grade in the US.

8th,9th,10th,11th & 12th graders = 20 million.

So 20 million students are eligible for AMC10/AMC12

Of them, only 300K took the AMC10/AMC12

Of them, only 10K were invited to take the AIME

Of them, only 500 were invited to take the USAMO

Of them, only 50 went to the MOPs

Of them, only 6 went to the IMO & won.

The article is about 4th & 8th graders, of which we have 8 million.

Now, suppose those 4th graders get to 8th grade, then the 8th graders would be in 12. That makes both cohorts eligible for AMC10/12. At that point, they become 8 million out of the 20 million. So 120K of them take the AMCs, 4K take the AIME, 200 get into USAMO, 20 get invited into the MOPs, and best case 2 kids make it into the IMO.

So from this grand experiment, 2 kids will emerge the victor, and we are supposed to back-extrapolate that 8 million kids do ok. Aaalright then.../s

Aside - a long time ago, I worked on a high school math problem which involved summing the thousand fractions 0/1, 1/2, 2/3,...upto 999/1000, so I did the obvious iteration.

(display (foldl + 0 (map (lambda (x) (/ x (+ x 1))) (range 0 1000))))

The solution matched and I was happy. Then I thought wouldn't it be neat to do this in a dozen languages and benchmark...but got nowhere with that idea. None of the languages supported fraction addition without jumping through whole bunch of hoops. I wonder if its still the same situation. If someone wants to give this a shot, the answer if you do this for the first ten is 17819/2520.

> how pelicans will raise two chicks and then kick the weakest

there is a youtube video ( pls don’t watch ) that gave me nightmares for days on end. i had completely forgotten about those pelicans and now you had to bring it up again in the comments. the little pelican had a broken leg. It was limping, so mom and brother together pushed it out of the nest. Very cruel.

> it continually increases variance in the system as warming increases

This is strictly false. A consistent warming trend reduces the occurrence of extreme cold events. This will narrow the range of temperature fluctuations, which directly reduces the time derivative of temperature variance.

Also, oceans redistribute heat more efficiently due to climate change. This causes the temperature gradients between regions to weaken. Once again the time derivative of temperature variance is reduced. Empirically, one can observe this decrease in temperature variance in the tropics.

96! Lived a full life. RIP.

I wrote a lot of QBASIC. 1986-90ish, old Bangalore. I was 12. There was no Mac or Unix or Windows in India those days. Only MSDOS. I had a 386 box. I would insert a 5.25" floppy, boot into command.com, then CD to GWBASIC.EXE and enter GWBASIC. Wrote a lot of GWBASIC to annoy friends and family by emitting high pitched sounds. You could do SOUND 2000+i, j, where i is the frequency & j was duration. You could even control volume from BASIC. I would put that in a WHILE WEND loop and make it go crazy. People didn't know how to turn it off once it got going. Then suddenly one day DOS went away and we had something called MS WINDOWS 3.1 and you had to insert a white round ball into a mouse and click on icons, no more command line, and even GWBASIC was gone, they put QBASIC and it came with snake program. Then I got into the graphics craze. We had a CGA & so I did SCREEN 2, then used LINE and CIRCLE to my heart's content. Few colors only. Then we upgraded to VGA monitor then SCREEN 12 was a full 640x480, I wrote QBASIC to make annoying sounds while drawing. It was an amazing childhood, thanks to this miracle language. BASIC led to something called CLIPPER, then I did some FOXPRO, got paid actual rupees to write an inventory control system in FOXPRO, then MFC, Borland C++...all the way upto today.

But it all started with BASIC. Amazing language. Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.

> "let's use our very scarce resources helping the bottom kids"

So why does the richest country on the planet have "very scarce resources" only when it comes to educating its kids ? Of course, that very same public school has a stadium that is easily several times larger than facilities provided for Olympic level athletes in a poor country like India. That same school has a music program with a huge ballroom, recording studio, fancy musical instruments...bass sax, harps, bassoons and contrabassoons, double bass, violas...like literally, even a top of the line Bollywood studio doesn't have half of this. USA has chosen to prioritize just about everything other than basic classroom stem education. Then when you ask the math teacher why the kids don't know their logarithms and trig tables, he is like...well we have calculators and chromebooks. I have spent multiple years trying to engage with school board officials in public schools here in the mid-west. The most reasonable, unemotional, takeaway after all this engagement is that Americans are simply not interested in classroom education. They don't have teacher, don't have the time to teach, don't care for books or chalkboards...its simply not their thing. That's fine. I do hope all of this hyper-investment in music and sports produces some world class track and field athlete who can run a mile under three minutes while playing the bassoon.

The blame for why nobody says Donald goes to Walt Disney.

The hashtag is #NYTReadalong. https://x.com/hashtag/NYTReadalong?src=hashtag_click

> So you can read the movie like a comic book?

people also enjoy the opposite experience. when my kid was 4-5, we watched these youtube videos which were just books. the camera hovered over a page of nursery rhymes, and the narrator would read them out loud. its fairly popular among immigrant parents who don’t speak good English but whose kids go to school in the us/uk etc. I wouldn’t know the meaning or how to pronounce several phrases in say Little Jack Horner sat in a corner etc. - so better to watch the book than read it.

I also follow a journalist on twitter who makes these videos of the new york times. So instead of subscribing to the newspaper and reading it, I am watching the newspaper being read by this journalist, who then adds some color to the topic as well, so I know what to think about this topic.

> it can be hard to discuss education in our societies

I found it quite ironical how the whole topic has been hijacked into this side discussion. For the record, Ramanujan is NOT a product of the Indian education system. In fact, that system was quite cruel & off-putting to him. He was a self-taught math prodigy. Apart from the well known 2 big biopics, there are numerous TV soaps telecasted in India in various languages that regularly emphasize this point. He taught himself mostly using Inequalities by GH Hardy, & several other books, all of which are freely available right now at the click of a button. Nobody is stopping anybody from studying math, and education or the lack of it has nothing to do with any of this.

> root mean square standard deviation, RMSSD

This is incorrect. RMSSD means root mean square successive differences. Interestingly, if you actually compute what you wrote ie root mean square standard deviation, you will get the same result as sdnn.

Dude those were different times. I remember building half adders and full adders with nand gates. Computing poles and residues by hand for 2nd order butterworth filter. There was so much depth to that!

of course nowadays i do the dumb shit everyone else is doing. import numpy as np, np.ones(arr), on and on. i once came across really convoluted business logic. rewrote that as a giant boolean expression and then simplified it using k maps. but when i tried to explain that in the kt session, they were like - what is k map ? what does that mean ? i thought wow i can explain it nicely and win the day. After all, in the kingdom of the blind, one eyed man is king. Instead, when i gave many examples and asked if they had any questions, they were like - what if a truck hits you on your way home ? then who will do this k map minimizing for us ? that’s when I suddenly recalled what actually happened in country of the blind. Nunez doesn’t become King. Instead, the blind fuckers chase Nunez to poke his eyes out. so in order to survive on the H1B, i had to forget all about the k map. pretend i am also blind and continue importing that numpy. otherwise i can forget about putting food on table.

I think this is a very constructive proposal. I am definitely on board with it.

I don't see why we should shoehorn these topics into ap-stats. That curriculum is entirely based on classical statistics, which is very useful for what it does.

But suppose there were an ap-ml, where we have word prediction of LLMs, maybe an attempt to teach multi-dim distributions without calculus (ha! I'm seriously skeptical of that, but its your idea), rejection sampling and a suite of easy to code mcmc recipes - MH, Gibbs, Slice Sampling, Importance Sampling, and a dash of Bayesian theory - if there were such a course, it would be quite popular among the high schoolers I work with.

btw, college board does revamp ap curriculum quite often. AP African American Studies was introduced last year. Maybe AP-ML is on the cards.

Throwing out units 6,7,8 is a horrible, horrible idea. That’s the only useful part of the curriculum. In fact, most of the rest of the sections are not even stat. They are just plain math. Rest of your suggestions are just plain wild. If there is some unicorn high schooler out there who meets your wild template - knows no calculus but knows rejection sampling and MH - I would like to see which foolish employer hires this clown.

> Unfortunately there are not enough.

Totally agree with you. That was the case in my area in the midwest as well. That's why I started my own mathcircle. Its not as hard as you might think - you just need a few interested students, a few textbooks, and plenty of time.

We focus entirely on competition math - so mathcounts, amc 8/10/12, aime/jmo/imo. The material gets real hard real fast, so kids will drop, new kids will join etc. The ones who stick around benefit immensely. I've had 11-12 year olds in my group qualify both for the AIME (one of 6000 kids in the usa) as well as mathcount nationals (one of 200 kids in the usa).