Tag Archives: Math

Five years ago, I wrote about an interesting factoid that Paul Graham posted (probably to Twitter) concerning how many unique orderings of a standard 52 playing card deck there are. Almost all Irreal readers will immediately raise their hands shouting, … Continue reading →

As some of you know, I was trained as a mathematician. I’ve always been a bit of a math nerd and read about mathematics even as a child. Long ago, probably when I was still in elementary school, I read … Continue reading →

Today’s date, 02022020, is a palindrome. Palindromic dates happen all the time but today is special. So special that it’s unique. First of all, today is a palindromic date everywhere. Because of the silly date format that either the U.S. … Continue reading →

All Irreal readers, I’m sure, are familiar with the power of compounding if only because they know about “compound interest.” Every now and then, Paul Graham (re)tweets an interesting mathematical fact. The last example I wrote about is the fact … Continue reading →

From Paul Graham we have this interesting fact: Any time you pick up a well shuffled deck, you are almost certainly holding an arrangement of cards that has never before existed and will likely never exist again. – Yannay Khaikin … Continue reading →

Jeremy Kun has an amusing and startling trick: pick any polynomial \(p(x)=c_{0}+c_{1}x+\cdots+c_{n}x^{n}\) where the \(c_{i}\) are non-negative integers and the degree, \(n\), is any positive integer you like. Kun will then ask you one at a time for the value … Continue reading →

Back in March, I wrote about Edward Frenkel and his explanation of the purported backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. I also mentioned his book Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. Now Zygmunt Zając over at FastML … Continue reading →