Pinned toot

Hi! I'm a maths student at Helsinki University. For the past year or so I've been writing a popular (not as in visitors) maths blog, www.nollakohta.fi, in Finnish. In addition to human languages (FIN/ENG/SWE/FRE) I respond to quite a few computer ones (esp. C#).

Interested in seeing if toots > tweets!

@petrilaarne I think just "homorphism" would be even worse

My long-term career goal is to find and name something a holeomorphism, just to mess with people struggling with holomorphisms, homomorphisms and homeomorphisms.

Glad we have unambiguous terminology!

I’m not that much into logic, but two weeks into a course on predicate logic, the stuff feels logical in a very pleasant way. Probably still not going to take more courses on it, but can understand why it would be fun.

one of these days my mathematical knowledge will catch up with the state of the art at the beginning of the 20th century...

Do you love maths magazines and sides of octagons? Then you'll love our 8th issue! chalkdustmagazine.com/

Any others here who like studying maths but *not* any of the sciences?

May seem weirdly paradoxical given that many sciences require some good grasp of maths to strengthen their models and more precisely describe phenomena, but I couldn't keep up in pre-uni school that well (I've done physics, chemistry, biology). Not sure why. Something might have stopped me from properly retaining the extra non-mathematical systems in my head. 🤷‍♂️

Math courses:
- Shapes I
- Shapes II
- Intro to Imaginary Shapes
- Calculating I
- Calculating II
- Letters
- Actual Letters (the others were fake sorry)
- Theoretical Circles & Arrows

Issue 08 of Chalkdust is coming out on 19 October. Why don't you come along to our launch party? chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/cha

- a microSD card weighs somewhere around 0.4g
- the highest capacity microSD that's easily available is 256GB
- a trebuchet can throw a 90kg projectile over 300m

90kg worth of microSD cards is 225,000 of them

Therefore a trebuchet can throw 57.6PB of data over 300m

This would have the highest throughput of any telecommunications network ever created

Worried about the dominance of big instances? No, really, this is quite natural.

As an emergent and self-governing system, it could be expected that the size distribution of #Mastodon instances roughly follows Zipf's law.

Does it?

At first you see the top 6 instances, and then the rest. But on a log-log scale the size distribution is close to a straight line, which would be expected from an emergent system.

#statistics

1/

Astonishing follow-up - she donates her prize!

bbc.co.uk/news/science-environ

I deleted about 5000 lines of code today. It felt so good.

Knowing mental arithmetic tricks saved me from several minutes of debugging today. A supposedly integer algorithm was producing results like 17.428571, just due to me dividing a circle not in 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 9 parts!

It turns out my freshman year in was equivalent to 11 centimetres of paper. (I used ebooks for statistics.)

@andrewt From Gareth McCaughan.

The average number of ways to express numbers from 1 to N
as sums of two squares

=

(total number of ways to express numbers from 1 to N as $X^2+Y^2$ )/N

=

(total number of (x,y) for which $0 < x^2+y^2<=N$ )/N

=

(total number of (x,y) inside the circle
$X^2+Y^2=N$, minus 1)/N

=

(area inside the circle $X^2+Y^2=N$ + O(N) ) /N

=

(area inside the circle $X^2+Y^2=\sqrt{N}^2$, +O(N)) /N

= $\pi\sqrt{N}^2+O(N))/N$

= $\pi+O(1/N)$

Just finished Jordan Ellenberg's How Not to Be Wrong. Good mix of theory + rhetoric, touches on some hot issues, and imparts several important moral lessons.

A little spoilery: the book indeed suggests ways to not be wrong using mathematical lenses, but cleverly doesn't promise "ways to be right" 😉

@JordiGH In fact it's based on a lovely result from the 1930's, way before the probability arguments become common in combinatorics.

CC: @petrilaarne

I quite liked @ColinTheMathmo’s entry to : a simple, initially counterintuitive result that becomes intuitively obvious after a quick think! I wonder how many totally different ways there are to prove it.

If you haven’t yet, go read about it and beautiful Penrose tilings: aperiodical.com/2018/07/the-bi

A Mastodon instance for maths people. The kind of people who make $\pi z^2 \times a$ jokes.
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