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In briefStephan T. Lavavej's CppCon 2019 talk on implementing floating-point to_chars and from_chars in Microsoft's C++ STL. It covers the history of float-string conversion and the algorithms that make it much faster.
In briefJohn Rauser's Strata 2014 keynote argues that programmers can learn statistics quickly by simulating random processes and shuffling data. He explains p-values through resampling rather than formulas.
In briefHillel Wayne's PyCon 2018 talk on testing beyond pytest and mypy. It introduces property-based testing with the Hypothesis library and design-by-contract with dpcontracts, and shows how to combine them with an existing test suite.
In briefOwen Maitzen's animated hour-long introduction to Hackenbush, a simple combinatorial game, and how its strategy leads to surreal numbers and the roots of the number system.
In briefA walkthrough of the Quake III fast inverse square root, explaining where the constant 0x5f3759df comes from. It covers IEEE 754 floats, the bit hack that approximates a logarithm, and a Newton's method refinement.
In briefRichard Hamming's 1995 lecture on n-dimensional space, showing how geometric intuition about spheres and cubes breaks down in high dimensions. It is part of his course on learning to learn.
In briefIsaac Arthur examines the Dark Forest theory, Cixin Liu's proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox in which civilizations stay silent and may destroy any that reveal themselves. He tests the theory's underlying assumptions and arguments.
In briefMartin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm using Sudoku-like constraint solving and shows how he implemented it with Blender and Godot. It links demos and reference articles.
In briefTimothy Gowers thinks aloud, in real time, as he tries to understand why Pascal's determinant equals 1. He does not fully solve it in this episode, but shows his exploratory process.
In briefNumberphile with Dr Holly Krieger shows how the digits of pi surprisingly emerge from the Mandelbrot set. A short, accessible math explainer.
In briefPrimer simulates green beard altruism, where individuals recognize and help others carrying a shared marker, and shows how imposters affect its evolution. It is an animated evolution simulation based on published papers.
In briefA long Lex Fridman interview with Stephen Wolfram on complexity, cellular automata, computational irreducibility and the Wolfram Physics Project.
In briefElasticsearch engineer and Lucene committer Adrien Grand explains the design decisions inside a Lucene index and what problems it can and cannot solve. The talk goes into how Lucene stores data for fast search and analytics.
In briefTechnology Connections explains why the superheterodyne radio has its name and how mixing frequencies lets it tune stations well. It walks through the underlying wave phenomena and algebra and why the design solved a hard tuning problem.
In briefTom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.
In briefDerren Brown's TV special in which he convinces a person he has a system for predicting horse race winners, demonstrating how survivorship bias and selective outcomes can fake predictive powers.
In briefA segment from Carl Sagan's original Cosmos explaining the fourth spatial dimension through analogy with a two-dimensional world and shadow projection.
In briefJulia Galef uses pictures to explain Bayes' rule, then tells three personal stories showing how she applies it to improve her thinking.
In brief3Blue1Brown explains how holograms record a 3D scene on 2D film, using wave diffraction and phase. The video includes demonstrations of several real holograms.
In brief3Blue1Brown illustrates how enormous the 256-bit search space is, showing how infeasible it is to find a hash or key by guessing and checking.
In briefChristof Paar's university lecture introducing Galois fields and finite-field arithmetic as used in AES. It covers the mathematics behind the AES S-box.
In briefA panel with Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong and Carl Hewitt, hosted by Francesco Cesarini, on the history and future of concurrency. The three creators of CSP, Erlang and the actor model discuss their differing approaches.
In briefMathematician Colin Wright demonstrates juggling and explains the mathematics of juggling patterns, including notation that led to new throwing patterns. It is a public presentation at the Museum of Mathematics aimed at a general audience.
In briefTom Murphy's satirical SIGBOVIK 2007 presentation, delivered under a pseudonym, proving that generalized Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete. It is a short, deadpan take on a complexity theory result.
