Armchair linguist and self-taught coder battling with math phobia as I learn the numerical nuts and bolts of machine learning. The site’s name is an anagram of my name—nothing more.
Though modular arithmetic is rather obscure, we actually use it every day—primarily when we tell time. And if you’re a programmer, you have probably used the % operator before. However, there is much more to modular arithmetic, and the way it seems to turn normal math on its head is very fascinating.
The AKS test is an award-winning algorithm for proving whether an integer is prime, though I realized too late that it is too slow to be of any practical use. Writing the code itself was useful, though.
In which I (1) discover that the purpose of linear algebra is not to just manipulate spreadsheets and move vectors around but to make your code faster and cleaner—in other words, to give it a Zen uppercut; and (2) learn LaTeX and start a blog just to see syntax-highlighted code and properly typeset math on the same page.
