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18
May
2013
Taking a break

Taking a break

If you are following my blog regularly, you will know that I usually posts once a week on Saturday. However, nothing new has been posted the last couple of weeks. I just wanted to let you know that the site has not been abandoned or anything like that. However, I do have a lot of things going on right now and only 24 hours per day, and that meant I had to stop doing something. Posting on my blog was one of the things.

I will pick it up again someday, I know I will. I will also try to come up with a few different other posts and topics. I already have one idea which you will see in a few weeks I hope.

 

 

Posted by Kristian in Other, 4 comments
24
Dec
2012
Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

A very merry Christmas to all of you out there. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, I still wish you a happy on of them. It is a wonderful time to spend time with your families and I hope that you all got something nice for and mathy for Christmas.

Personally I use some of the time between Christmas and New year to reflect over the year gone by. What have I learned, what have been good, what have been bad. Not just around mathematical subject, but all aspects of life. And not least, what do I want to change next year.

I started the blog in 2010, but didn’t move  it to the current domain until March 4 2011, so 2012 have been the first whole year of the blog. And what a year. This year Bjarki joined me on the site and wrote several posts, especially about UVA Online Jugde, and also what I consider a rather interesting post about the Disjoint-set datastructure. Right now he is busy studying at university, but I am sure that he will come around again at some point. Continue reading →

Posted by Kristian in Other, 2 comments
19
Nov
2012
Constructive criticism – A viewpoint from the soap box

Constructive criticism – A viewpoint from the soap box

Lately quite a few comments trickle in to mathblog, and I absolutely love that. Everything from pointing out mistakes, showing solutions, given pointers for other solution methods and all the way to disagreeing with me.

As everyone who has posted a comment also know, is that I hold all comments for moderation. I do that mainly in order to avoid spam (the counter now at 36498 of those), but also moderate the comments, in case there is something which I don’t find belongs on the site. Continue reading →

Posted by Kristian in Other, 0 comments
01
Nov
2012
Relatively prime – Stories from the mathematical domain

Relatively prime – Stories from the mathematical domain

Yesterday I listened to an episode of Relatively prime called Chinook. And it has been one of the most compelling stories I have ever heard. It was a fantastic but also sad story about checkers and man against machine, a battle that lasted two decades.

Relatively Prime is a series of eight shows all about the stories behind mathematics that was funded through Kickstarter. I promoted it here on the blog back then, but I never got around to backing it. I was too reluctant to the kickstarter idea, which was completely new to me. Something I sincerely regret today. Continue reading →

Posted by Kristian in Other, 2 comments
12
Oct
2012
A few interesting courses

A few interesting courses

A friend of mine pointed me towards something that looks like an interesting course And sparking my curiosity I started digging around a bit and found a few more courses in the field of computer science and math, that I found interesting. I haven’t had time to take actually watch them yet, but I thought I would share them with you.

The first course is a cource called Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, which is exactly what the title says it is. It is about midway in progress now, but it seems that you can sign up for the course and tag along anyway. Continue reading →

Posted by Kristian in Other, 0 comments
13
Aug
2012
Monday links

Monday links

Another Monday is upon us, and another batch of links is due. This week I’m going to focus on Dynamic Programming (or DP for short). The reason is that upcoming Project Euler problems are DP- and memoization heavy. Another reason is that DP problems are quite popular, so it’s definitely a good skill to have.

First up is a TopCoder Algorithm Tutorial, namely Dynamic Programming: From novice to advanced. This is a good “first look” at DP. It’s a bit heavy in the end, but that part can be skipped.

After you’ve read that, you should take a look at Bruce Merry‘s introduction to Dynamic programming. It’s got a really great step-by-step approach to solving a DP problem, which in my experience works quite well. Continue reading →

Posted by Bjarki Ágúst in Other, 5 comments
30
Jul
2012
Monday links

Monday links

This Monday I have a couple of links lined up, both math related and non-math related.

First up is a Wikibook titled High School Mathematics Extensions. It contains over 140 pages covering topics like Primes, Modular Arithmetic, Logic, Discrete Probability, Mathematical Programming, and more. It also has exercises and projects for each topic. It’s directed towards 14 to 18 year olds who are interested in mathematics, but this is a good and solid introduction for anyone interested in the aforementioned topics, and can also be a good refresher for more advanced students. The Wikibook is still under construction, so if you have anything to add to it, I encourage you to do so! Continue reading →

Posted by Bjarki Ágúst in Other, 5 comments
21
May
2012
The MathBlog tools collection updated

The MathBlog tools collection updated

Just wanted to make a bit of advertisement for the tool section of the website which have been updated and new tools added.

Bjarki has been busy and developed several new tools which might come in handy for you when trying to see if a hypothesis could lead to a solution for the problem you are sitting with.

Updated tools

First of all the Prime factorization tool has been updated.  So now it gives you a little more than just the factorization. It gives you the number of distinct factors, the number of divisors and not least the value of Euler’s totient function. Yep that’s right, so head over and check it out. Continue reading →

Posted by Kristian in Other, 2 comments
07
May
2012
Join the competitions they said! See new worlds they said!

Join the competitions they said! See new worlds they said!

We have added a new section to the site with many more programming challenges and upcoming competitions and events.

Sites with programming challenges

First of all we have a list of sites which offers programming and math challenges for you to try out. It can be found in the top menu under programming challenges. So if you are out of Project Euler problems, or want to test your skills at something less mathy and more computer sciency then some of these sites might be for you. ones of them is the UVa Online Judge which we have started covering. So check them out.

If you have know of a site that you think should be listed for others to enjoy, don’t hesitate on letting us know, either through comments on this post or through our contact form. The section is still very new, so there are most likely a lot of sites that we don’t know of. Continue reading →

Posted by Kristian in Other, 0 comments
04
May
2012
The new kid on the blog

The new kid on the blog

As you (of course) must have noticed, not all of the posts are written by me anymore. I have gotten a new guy on board in order to serve you even more goodies than I my self was able to. So I would like to formally welcome Bjarki on board on the blog and hope that you will all receive his contributions well and learn a lot from them. I know I do.

Bjarki aka Suprdewd have been hanging around the blog for quite a while now giving me some very useful sparring on problems as well as encouraging me to continue writing even through periods where time or interest was missing. I am grateful for that.

 

As a start (and as you have noticed) Bjarki will cover some of the problems posed by UVA online judge. It is problems which are a bit more algorithmic than most of the Project Euler problems. But just as fun non-the-less. These problems will be covered in Java, at least as a start since that is one of the accepted languages on the site.

We have lots of ideas for new topics and actions on the site that we want to implement and develop, so I think that we will all go into an exciting time and hope you will enjoy it.

So once again, welcome Bjarki. I am really looking forward to this.

Posted by Kristian in Other, 2 comments