John L. Taylor

177 posts

Points from the Professionals

A fun question: If you could have the entire world know just one thing about your profession or expertise, what would it be? My answer for Data Science and Machine Learning: Automated intelligence plays a role in almost every facet of our lives and will increasingly disrupt things, for good and for ill. This includes replacing workers, enabling new discoveries, and magnifying the manipulation of our personal, political, and financial lives. And the private sector is not going to effectively police itself. Also, ML and AI are making great strides in application-specific ways, but (contra Ray Kurzweil) the singularity is […]

Machine Learning Radically Simplified

My description of machine learning using only the ten hundred most used words (via the up-goer five text editor):  This is the study and work of making computers learn. It has three important parts. First, it needs number pictures of how things could be. Second, it needs a way to see how good these pictures are. Finally, it needs a way to find the best picture from the group of possible number pictures. Once the best picture is found, it is used to guess what new things will be like or should be like. This helps us do many cool things […]

36 Methods of Proof

36 Methods of Proof 1 Proof by obviousness “The proof is so clear that it need not be mentioned.” 2 Proof by general agreement “All in favor?…” 3 Proof by imagination “Well, we’ll pretend it’s true…” 4 Proof by convenience “It would be very nice if it were true, so…” 5 Proof by necessity “It had better be true, or the entire structure of mathematics would crumble to the ground.” 6 Proof by plausibility “It sounds good so it must be true.” 7 Proof by intimidation “Don’t be stupid; of course it’s true.” 8 Proof by lack of sufficient time […]

LaTeX Test

We interpolate points by polynomial Its coefficients are found as a solution of system of linear equations: Code example: def fib(n): if n == 0: return 0 elif n == 1: return 1 else: return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)