I am working through Herb Gross‘s wonderful vector calculus course and doing the exercises, which makes you engage much more with the material than just watching the videos. There was an optional unit on vectors in 3D or “space curves”. I struggle with visualisation and wanted to skip it but…

Have you ever wondered what the first computer program, designed by Ada Lovelace, was supposed to do? Hint: it didn’t print out “Hello, World!”. Ada was too hardcore for that. It printed out Bernoulli numbers. What the hell are Bernoulli numbers and why did Ada choose them as the subject…

In my previous post on Pascal’s triangle I showed how to derive the formulas for permutations and combinations and why they correspond to binomial coefficients. These formulas are easy to derive. As an exercise I tried deriving the formula for combinations allowing repetitions and found it hard. I almost gave…

Being interviewed is, next to giving talks, pretty damn stressful. And like talks, it doesn’t seem to matter how much experience I have, I still get nervous. Like all things, it takes practice to give the performance we want. It’s hard to get good at it when we do it…

Finally I can tell you why I started this maths blog series. I was supposed to be doing something for my financial future. I thought “hmm I better understand how mortgages work — what was the formula for compound interest again”? I vaguely remember doing these calculations when I was…

The Staircase of Mount Meru. Khayyam’s Triangle. Yang Hui’s Triangle. There are many names for Pascal’s Triangle. I was shown this triangle in school and told we could use it to get combinations and binomial coefficients. I don’t remember being excited at the time. But that’s because I didn’t know…

This week I start a new job as VP of Engineering, Apps at Clue! I made the decision to leave a couple of months ago and the recent news has been hard. SoundCloud has been the best company to work for: amazing product, amazing people, amazing work environment… it was…

You might have heard this old nursery rhyme: As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, Each wife had seven sacks, Each sack had seven cats, Each cat had seven kits: Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, How many were there going to St. Ives? …

Decision paralysis. That state you fall into when you stand perplexed before an everyday decision: you are no longer present in the world; your mind is stuck in a state of constipated anxiety; you try to choose the best option but nothing is good, you break the trance by going…