#cs nerd

[mathsbian]

Happy Birthday, Alan Turing!

[lattescribble]

I should probably draw other characters (and write my resume)

[cursedslimecicle]

Day 220: who let this guy into opensauce..

Submitted by @chaoticpancicle

[mathsbian]

I have not done grad school (… yet?) so keep that in mind:

Favorites | Most Loathed

calculus

differential equations (apparently that’s not classed as calculus everywhere?)

statistics

linear algebra

higher analysis (I don’t remember what was covered in this class I was having a mental health crisis that semester, I have a topology book I think was for this and I remember this professor—who I only had for this class—talking about groups and rings)

number theory

••cryptography

non-Euclidean geometry

computational analysis (part of my computer science coursework but very math heavy, was entirely working backwards to a Turing Machine)

Math enthusiasts of tumblr. What math subjects have you studied and which ones were your favorite? Which ones were your least favorite? Which ones were the hardest?

[mathsbian]

Oh hey,

Happy World Logic Day, mathblr!

[mathsbian]

Yes it does, I have never seen a sponsored post for x reader fic because I filtered the tag (I think it was one of the first ones I filtered before I found that list of radfem tags to block). It doesn’t work for full blown ads that show up under the dash feed or in between posts, but it does work on sponsored posts, because those are actual extant posts on the website that have tags and obey all the same rules as a Blaze. It’s just been “blazed” by a corporate entity that probably also paid Tumblr to make the post and blog and run it for them.

Tumblr just put a fcuking harry potter post on my feed as a "recommendation based on your likes"

Why not recommend me smallpox next. Or arthritis maybe.

[bigdreamsandwildthings]

☕️📖🤍

[kaiserouo]

Gabriel, the Oracle Machine

(prev)

[mathsbian]

Yeah, this. WolframAlpha is very powerful, accurate, and helpful when you’re stuck in some regard. It can graph, it can prove, it can calculate, and it shows you all of this at once.

There’s even an argument to be made that computers can help with interpretation, as data science has come pretty far, so computers are also getting better and better all the time at identifying statistically interesting data points and data sets. Or finding the underlying connection between data. You can’t necessarily jump straight from WolframAlpha or something similar to doing statistical analysis, they’re slightly different computations, so you’d need different systems optimized for each of those steps, but computers are opening up a lot of possibilities in fields like graph theory (there’s a group of mathematicians studying knots that have been using computers to find new stable knot configurations that hadn’t been found by human calculations yet!)

Like, OP, you aren’t completely off-base. You said in another reblog that you’re in high school, and I definitely think that high school students need to be using calculators more conservatively than they might be currently (than they were when I was in school, and we never had online learning confounding the teachers ability to tell us to keep our calculators off our desks for this lesson/quiz/test/review). There’d be a lot less confusion about the order of operations amongst adults on Facebook if everyone was forced to not rely on calculators for longer. There’s no beating the speed of the human mind, compared to typing in a calculation, when trying to do just one or two small calculations (like calculating a tip yourself, or estimating your grocery total and how much tax there will be in the US).

But computers ARE math, and using math to do math just makes sense. We have always used new mathematical concepts and tools to expand our mathematical horizons.

Calculators are flawed and aside from computing large numbers have not much purpose in pure mathematics.

This is not a statement about generative ai (although it would be completely useless in all facets of mathematics).

I will not pretend that I am an expert, I am no mathematician, but I absolutely adore the subject. It is what I want to spend my life doing. I will not pretend that I am the most knowledgeable so I would be delighted to hear some other opinions.

In my experience I have found the standard scientific calculator to be flawed. It has failed to give a distinct answer when the answer logically is different. As in, the difference between the numbers is so small it counts it as the same number. However, this is not 0.999... = 1. This has a finite number of decimals.

Aside from the actual calculation calculators can only aid in checking arithmetic really. The basis of mathematics is proof, which requires the human mind. I believe that in no way can the human mind can ever be replaced in terms of proofs and concepts.

Thank you for coming to my uninformed shittalk.

[gray-crackleway]

day three: relationships

literally trust me they're for LIFE!! they're best friends. they met in high school. they transitioned together. they get jobs at the same places. they moved in together. FOR LIFE AND I MEAN IT.

@carmensandiego-ocweek

[pov-amna]

When you find out that your 'original' code is just a copy of a copy of a copy...

[mathsbian]

BOOLEAN LOGIC FTW

You come across two guards, each guarding a path. One guard always lies and one guard always tells the truth. You can tell instantly which one is which, and the two guards will each let you go up and down the paths as much as you want.

At the end of each of those two paths is another two guards guarding two more paths, with the same setup as the original two guards. At the end of each of those four paths is another two guards, etc, etc, etc. This continues as far as you can see.

The question is this: If you wanted to write a message in binary by tracing a path down this peculiar road, using the "lying" guard's path and "truthful" guard's path at each intersection as digits, would you use "lying" for zero and "truthful" for one, or would you use "truthful" for zero and "lying" for one?

truthful for one, obviously

[annamariehamilton-unofficial]

Literary Hot Takes #1: The Bible Is Epic Fantasy

OK, so, like, if you think about it just a little too hard, the Bible is kind of epic fantasy. I mean, not in the sense of "made up" or "not true," (I do happen to believe in it), but I mean in the sense that it actually follows a lot of the tropes of the genre.

Kings and warriors with unpronounceable lineages, epic battles of Good and Evil, supernatural creatures, calamitous Egyptian wizard slams and miracle healings that look an awful lot like magic, a Chosen One hero who comes back from the dead, and the literal end of the world.

Like, it's got the epic sweep of Lord of the Rings. The winsome simplicity of The Chronicles of Narnia. The bonkers sex, violence, and political backstabbing of Game of Thrones. And the head-bending horror of "Call of Cthulhu" (I mean, Biblical cherubim are the good guy version of eldrich horrors and you can't convince me otherwise).

There are 2.5 billion fans of this book who dedicate an entire day of the week to LARP-ing.

And (depending on your belief system) it might just be a true story.

Wild.

[noecturnalstudies]

If I have learned one thing at uni so far it's that paying for textbooks is a skill issue

[recreationaldivorce]

the annoying thing abt becoming a cs student is instead of ppl being like :O how did you know that they just assume it's bc im a cs student instead. no they dont teach me that im just a nerd

[bigdreamsandwildthings]

Snowy bookworm vibes ❄️☃️🌨️