You're reading: Posts Tagged: algorithms

HLF Blogs: Leslie Lamport Thinks Your Code Is Bad

This week, Katie and Paul are blogging from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum – a week-long maths conference where current young researchers in maths and computer science can meet and hear talks by top-level prize-winning researchers. For more information about the HLF, visit the Heidelberg Laureate Forum website.

 


 

Image: Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation / © Bernhard Kreutzer

At last year’s HLF, Turing Award Leslie Lamport gave us his (not wholly complimentary) thoughts on the state of proof-writing in mathematics. Since he has worked in both maths and computer science, members of the latter discipline may have felt they got off quite lightly. Perhaps to redress the balance, this year we found out what he thinks is wrong with most people’s code and algorithms, in a talk titled If You’re Not Writing a Program, Don’t Use a Programming Language.

Hannah Fry’s Hello World is Radio 4 Book of the Week

This week Radio 4 has chosen Hannah Fry’s new book Hello World as its Book of the Week. This means excerpts from the book are read out each day, and you can listen along on iPlayer Radio.

To find out what the book’s like, read this review by Colin Beveridge.

Open Season: Pancake Flipping

In this series of articles, I’m writing about mathematical questions we don’t know the answer to – which haven’t yet been proven or disproven. This edition is a topical one, for Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday, celebrated in the UK this year on 9th February).

pancakesSome of the best mathematical teasers are those which originate in a real-world problem – although the problem for pure mathematicians is that that happens much less often than it does for applied mathematicians, who are presented with interesting real-world problems all the time. That’s why it’s especially nice when a more pure one pops up, and that’s exactly what happened to mathematician Jacob E Goodman, back in 1975.

Google+