## Fast Exponentiation, revisited

12/11/2019

Quite a while ago, I presented a fast exponentiation algorithm that uses the binary decomposition of the exponent $n$ to perform $O(\log_2 n)$ products to compute $x^n$.

While discussing this algorithm in class, a student asked a very interesting question: what’s special about base 2? Couldn’t we use another base? Well, yes, yes we can.

## Tweet time!

22/11/2016

I’ve been using twitter for about five years, and I wondered if my use of it changed over time, and more precisely, linked to my wake/sleep cycle. That’s fortunately kind of simple to check because you can simply request your whole Twitter archive, delivered as a plain CSV File! Let’s see how we can juice it.

## Pythagorean Triples

24/11/2015

The Pythagorean theorem, linking the sides of a right triangle, is one of the most useful basic mathematical identities. It is also one of the more entertaining. Loomis, in his book The Pythagorean Proposition (1968), gives 370 different proofs of the theorem. However, we’ll more often interested in computing the length of the hypotenuse, or finding triples—three natural numbers that makes the theorem hold—than finding a new proof for it.

There is, of course, the smallest possible triple (defined as involving the smallest possible numbers) 3, 4, 5. But there are infinitely more triples. Let’s see how we can generate them.

## Stirling’s series

02/12/2014

Last week, we had a look at how g++ handles tail-recursion. Turns out it does a great job. One of the example used for testing the compiler was the factorial function, $n!$.

We haven’t pointed it out, but the factorial function in last week’s example computed the factorial modulo the machine-size (unsigned) integer. But what if we want to have the best possible estimation?

## Programming Challenge: List Intersection

04/10/2011

The problem of computing luminance was rather of a bit-twiddling nature (and some of my readers came up with very creative solutions—far better than my own), and the problem of the Martian calendar was a bit more deductive (and still not solved, though some of the readers came close to a solution); and for the third programming challenge, I propose something a bit more algorithmic/basic data structure in tone.

The problem I propose in this challenge arises in a variety of settings, such in (simple) search engines, but performing it efficiently is not always trivial.

## The Large Hideous Collatzer

27/04/2010

Mathematics is still full of surprises. The solution to simple to state problems may elude mathematicians for centuries. One example is the celebrated Fermat’s Last Theorem (stating that equations of the form $x^n+y^n=z^n$ have no integer-only solutions for $n > 2$) that was finally solved by Andrew Wiles with tools Fermat couldn’t possibly know nor understand1.

Another one of those problems is the Collatz Conjecture. Proposed by Lothar Collatz in 1937, the conjecture is that a simple recurrence function—that we will discuss in detail in just a moment—terminates for all natural numbers. This one, however, isn’t solved yet.