Mathematician girl invites me to code some lines.
I arrive at her flat and she was alone so some part of me thought ehem. Anyway i took a look at the program first.
Me: so... it's a date?
Her: no im using cosmic radiation.
Me: huh?
Her: yeah accessing a value from a sensor gives a..

(Apparently she thought i was asking about the Random Function she was using, which usually uses the date)

Would you like to smile for 10 seconds? Read this short story:
*Story begins*
During World War II, numerous fighter planes were getting hit by anti-aircraft guns. Air Force officers wanted to add some protective armour/shield to the planes.
The question was "where"?
The planes could only support few more kilos of weight. Mathematicians were called for a short consulting project.
Fighter planes returning from missions were analysed for bullet holes per square foot.
They found 1.93 bullet holes/sq. foot near the tail of planes whereas only 1.11 bullet holes/sq. foot close to the engine.
The officers thought that since the tail portion had the greatest density of bullets, it would be the logical location for putting an anti-bullet shield.
A mathematician said exactly the opposite; more protection is needed where the bullet holes aren't - that is -around the engines.
His judgement surprised everyone. He said "He said We are counting the planes that returned from a mission. Planes with lots of bullet holes in the engine did not return at all".

Moral: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.

Source: From the book -
"How Not To Be Wrong", by Jordan Ellenberg.

Lmao I'm no mathematician but this shit doesn't add up.

A physicist, a mathematician, and a statistician go hunting.  They spot a deer, and take aim.  The physicist shoots first and misses 10 meters to the right.  The mathematician shoots next and misses 10 meters to the left.  The statistician then throws down his gun and proclaims, “we got it!”

Alan Turing - computer pioneer, code breaker and mathematician.

When you finally accept that in order to write a game engine all your self, you not only have to be a programmer but a mathematician.

Alright. Time to hit the math books for a while.

Junior dude in my team: Started working with the expectation to get dirty and go deep into technology (he was in fact a mathematician). The first two months he was happy like a little puppy playing around. Then suddenly he started talking about getting more responsibilities and beeing more a manager than a dev (because development is too stressful). Then on his last day of the probation period he quit out of nowhere because he got a job offer from a place he really wanted to go. He bought one beer per person in my team, but haven't invited my boss to that event. We suddenly realize why: He talked real shit about him!

What a dick!

Me and my two coworkers are the perfect start of a joke: a mathematician, a physicist and a computer scientist walk into a bar...

Had a panic attack during a coding assignment and now every time I think about that problem I just start spacing. Noice.

Also dear companies: if you wanna ask your interviewees about trying to deduce a theorem out of nowhere, maybe do it in the first test and not in the last one. Cause that’s a shot in the dark to someone who’s not a mathematician and id feel waaay less frustrated if I didn’t give you 6 hours of my life just to end up with an arbitrary task like this.

Teaching my little sister Mathematics (Grade/Class 12. Not at all easy).

And I can really understand the textbook definitions in the chapters. Back then, I never understood a single line of it.

Am I a more sound mathematician now or reading poor documentations has improved my skill to read complex and minimal contents!

First day of the academic year(CS):

(some uni official) - "And remember to become a good programmer you have to become an excellent mathematician first"

(Me): Oh shit.

Little did I know...

It is a second year now. And the only course I failed is the one that he lectured.

I had no fucking idea that people like this (mad)man exist.

Almost at every lecture he was introducing at leas one topic that was way beyond our program; as he thought they were interesting and "fun".

Many teachers at the University refered to him as a very 'ambitious' man. Then I didn't blame him he truly loved his profession and wanted to share as much knowledge as possible(I thought).

But two months ago he went to far. It was a second exam(for those who failed the first one). And believe me there were a few(60 out of 160 to be exact).

Only ~30 people showed up as the rest failed to many courses and would be kicked out of the uni anyway.

He was handing out the exams when I saw that whoever gets one slowly starts turning white.

I finally got my copy and immediately I realized that the tasks are from his favorite topics, the "fun" ones. 🤦

At this point I knew that it will be extremely hard to pass. But when I was reevaluating my life choices something draw my attention.

One of the tasks had a note below it: "Homework after the exam: It is a very interesting problem just assume x instead of y and try to solve it. PS: it is a lot of fun!"

At this point I lost it.😠 I don't care how much you love math, you should always assume that not everyone loves it as much as you do. So don't push it down the throat of people who clearly don't need a degree in this subject!

Now I'm preparing for the second semester with this guy. And I have a strong feeling that it will be hell of a ride... again.😐

BTW: Sorry that the rant is so long, it's the first one I wrote, and had to share it with someone 😀

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

A new mathematical constant was discovered recently: Bruce's constant

I took some code from the paper and adapted it in python.

def bruce(n):
J = log(n, 1.333333333333333) / log(n, 2)
K = log(n, 1.333333333333333) / log(n, 3)
return ((J+K)-e)+1

gives e everytime for ((J+K)-bruce)+1, regardless of the value of n.

bruce can always be aproximated with the decimal 4.5, telling you how close n can be used to aproximate e (usually to two digits).

Bruce's constant is equal to 4.5099806905005

It is named after that famous mathematician, bruce lee.

You'll start with four limbs and end up with two in a wheelchair!

I feel like "programmers are not computer technicians" joke is kinda overused lately. It doesn' matter if we are not technicians, we are very knowledgeable in computers and people knows that. People of course will try to get help from you when they can so it's not a wonder that they ask you to help with something they are not confident. Everyone that exercises practical professions lives through that. If your sister-in-law is a mathematician it's normal to ask for help if you are not able to come up with the right algorithm for the task. People depend on each other. That's how we survive.
But I'm not saying start helping everybody that can't open a pdf file. Just know who to choose to help. If they are a capable person or someone that's a part of your everyday life they will most likely repay you when you are also in need. Believe me everyone needs help time to time.

Italy, nation of tecnology. A work agency is looking for a mathematician or a statitician that use EXCEL.

A couple of days ago, an individual attempted to convince me that the National Security Agency is capable of cracking Rijndael encryption; as a response, I informed the individual of the infeasible nature of the factoring of extremely large semiprimes; however, my attempts were futile, as the individual believes that NSA possesses sufficient power to crack this encryption without intercepting the transmission of the corresponding private key.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is real; although this individual tends to be logically-minded, there does exist an exception to this good behaviour.

"It is easier to square a circle than get 'round a mathematician."

float integral = 0;
float dx=float.minValue;
for (float x = a; x<=b; x+=dx) {
integral+=f(x)*dx;
}

A classmate just literally wrote this and he believed it was the proper way to do it.
I asked him to integrate f(x)=1 on 0<x<1.

Probably a mathematician. I would be a very different person though, because a key element to my current lifestyle is that I never have to use my mathematical insight to the fullest and therefore I can work despite hangovers from nearly any substances. If I had to be sober to get anything done I'd need a level of self control which is very far from me at the moment.

If you ask a scientist what pi is, he'll tell you it equals 3.14159..
 If you ask a mathematician, he'll tell you pi equals the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter..
If you ask an engineer, he'll say "Pi? Well, it's about 3, but we'll call it 4 just to be safe.."
But if you ask a kid, he’ll ask if he can have ice cream with it...!

@Wisecrack
Hey where is my favourite crazy mathematician nowadays?!? 😀
I miss your posts, so i demand my portions of Wisecrack, like a proper junkie! 😀
Hope You are ok, and everything is fine

Packt.com (dev education books) is doing a survey of their readers. I don't fit into any of their boxes, closest one is data scientist.

I think I might really be a mathematician rather than a dev...

I hated maths at high-school.

And then the gay mathematician asked me, are you a ⊥ or a ⊤

any mathematician turned devs here?

I think developers with a formal mathematical education should be the ones actually developing softwares. Ordinary developers are just good cooks who know to prepare these recipes by knowing to mix and manage the Ingredients through their experience, developing software using various libraries and frameworks, I don't understand what innovation we devs do in it, makes me feel less passionate about my work sometimes.

(I embrace the fact that being a developer requires an arstisic craftsmanship to do it properly)

I still remember that afternoon when I was in 9th grade, it was raining outside, I entered in the lab for the first time, and there she was sitting alone, shining like a dew drop. I could not resist, and I sit with her for a while, we talked, we touched, and the magic happened. that was the day and today is the day, no one can take us apart. We are like made for each other. That was for the first time I touched a machine, and never looked back. The endless possibilities with programming, and desire to fulfil the everlasting thirst of creativity and problem solving made a developer/programmer/mathematician/physicist.

what happened when a mathematician and a graphic designer walked into a bar

ELLIPTIC CURVES

On science and religion. Inspied by a comment in another rant, credits to @Commodore and @cjbatz

According to Godel's incompletness theorems, aritmetics is incomplete and inconsistent. Therefore, any science based on aritmetics (dude, like, every) is also.
Therfore, as a mathematician, I must accept that there are things that cannot be proven by current science, and that there are statements that are true and false at the same time in current science.

So, science can't prove religious beliefs? It cant prove P vs NP either. It might someday. Science couldn't prove earth wasn't flat for a looong time. Or Pythagoras theorem.
But more importantly, if science can prove something, doesn't mean it can't prove the exact oposite.

This way of thinking allows for any and all ridiculous beliefs, under the shield of "it might be proven one day" or "doent't mean opposite isn't true also" but kerp in mind that there are complete and consistent sciences and proofs in them. Check if something's been proven to exist or not exist without doubt.

Did you hear about the mathematician who’s afraid of negative numbers?
He’ll stop at nothing to avoid them.

I'm beginning to feel like any kind of specific approximation via neural networks is a myth. That if you can't reduce output to simple categorical values that can be broadly interpreted between two points, that it doesn't work.

I have some questions and they don't seem to be getting answered about the design of the net. How many layers should I use ? How many neurons per layer ? How does this relate to the number of desired quantitive scalar outputs I'm looking to create, even if they are normalized, they can vary GREATLY and will if I'm approximating the out of several mathematical expressions. Based on this and the expected error ranges of these numbers and how many possible major digits could be produced within the domain of the variable inputs being introduced, how many neurons per layer ? What does having more layers do ? In pytorch there don't seem to be a lot of layer types per say, but there are a crap ton of activation functions, and should I just be using these at the tail end or should they actually be inserted between layers so the input of the next layer passes through another series of actiavtion functions ? what does this do to the range of output ?

do I need to be a mathematician to do this ?

remembered successes removed quantifiable scalars entirely from output, meaning that I could interpret successful results from ranges of decimal points.

but i've had no success with actual multi variable regression as of yet, even when those input variables are only 2 and on limited value ranges eg [0,100] and [0, 2pi]

and then there are training epochs to avoid overfitting, and reasonable expectation of batches till quality results will start to form.