When you pour in two cups of water, one cup of quinoa, you somehow get out four cups of cooked quinoa. How? Spherical packing.
Somehow, I made it through a BS in engineering without learning the math behind Fourier transforms. This visualization explains them really well, and shows how you can use them to decompose very complex shapes.
Math is awesome. I first learned of bifurcation diagrams in 2012, but even when you understand a concept well a simple visualization can be mind-bending.
A bunch of different stories in this episode, but I can’t not include a Radiolab episode that discusses Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
An amazing intimate story involving Morgenstern, Einstein, and of course Gödel, on his naturalization to become a US citizen in 1947. I won’t spoil it.
The kinds of things that mathematics allow us to do are pretty insane. I spent a few hours trying to wrap my head around the ideas that Vitalik explains in this series, but a lot of it went over my head. Made me want to go back and learn higher level math.
Technology is also interesting sometimes, not just dismal and apocalyptic. The printing press is a good example, and Smith starts his story there, leading all the way to today’s tooling. A somewhat misleading title, as it actually covers way more than just mathematic typography.
When I look at demos like these, I wish I had kept learning about differential equations after sophomore year of college. Complexity is awesome, and being able to model these crazy patterns with only a few lines of code would be great.
Reading about graphics and procedural generation has become a new hobby for me.
Useless but fun geospatial data analysis, because why not?
Life is strange. One letter (email?) could really change yours. Send it today.
Unsurprisingly, its Tyrion.