Posts filed under “mathematics”

Oh god, I'm going to talk about maths for a bit. Ignore me. You might find this interesting if you know what a derivative is and what it means.

This is a curiosity that my friend Anupam came up with. I'm not claiming any credit for noticing it but I thought I'd still share it with y'all. It only requires very rudimentary calculus, but it produces a result which, the more I think about it, the less intuitive it seems.

This comic has been pinned up in my lab for a while, I love it.

Via spikedmath.com.

This is a good paper but the choices of variable names are making me sad :(

Ah well… at least sometimes variable names lead to happy consequences. This is from the same paper:

(ehehehehehehehe…)

I watched this interesting talk on game design by Jonathan “Braid” Blow and Marc “Miegakure” ten Bosch. They espouse and explore a particular design aesthetic where the designer essentially plays the role of a mathematician. “Good design” then becomes a selection of orthogonal mechanisms (axioms), and an exhaustive-yet-minimal mapping-out of what’s derivable (theorems), and then demarcation of the boundary. Since it needs to be fun, the real art has to come from crafting surprise and tweaking axioms to capture exactly what you want. They both make some very interesting points, and I thought this comparison with mathematics was a particularly cool and apt way to frame the ideas.

This aesthetic is particularly apparent in the examples they use in the talk, including Braid, VVVVVV, Ikaruga and the as-yet-unreleased Miegakure.

I now have a home page over at the University of Bath, where I’m doing my PhD. It’s just for academic things and lists of publications. Find it here: cs.bath.ac.uk/~cajw20.

Here’s what I’m doing this week: the 28th annual Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics conference. I am presenting a paper there, “A graphical foundation for schedules”, joint work with my PhD supervisors Guy McCusker and John Power. There’s a preliminary version of the paper which will eventually appear in ENTCS. The talk had slides, though they contained unnecessary illustrative animations which are not there on the pdf.