Category Archives: Uncategorized

ChatGPT and Mathematics (III)

GPT-4 was just released. Here’s a preview of what it’s capable of. I tried throwing some mathematics problems at it to check out its capability. Problem 1: Cheryl’s Birthday Problem There’s an infamous logic problem from Singapore’s primary school Olympiad … Continue reading

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ChatGPT and Mathematics (II)

This post is only tangentially related to mathematics. As an experiment on AI-assisted learning, I tried to write a web application in Javascript + WebGL. At the start of this experiment, I had some experience with Javascript but absolutely no … Continue reading

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ChatGPT and Mathematics (I)

The Main Point ChatGPT is an AI language model that has been making the news recently. There are multiple articles on the internet on what the model is capable of so this will not be the focus of our post. … Continue reading

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Free Groups and Tiling

Introduction Consider the following simple problem. Prove that the shape on the left cannot be completely tiled by 20 polygons of the types shown on the right. The solution is rather simple: colour the shape in the following manner. This … Continue reading

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Solving Permutation-Based Puzzles

Introduction In the previous article, we described the Schreier-Sims algorithm. Given a small subset which generates the permutation group G, the algorithm constructs a sequence such that for: we have a small generating set for each Specifically, via the Sims … Continue reading

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Schreier-Sims Algorithm

Introduction Throughout this article, we let G be a subgroup of generated by a subset  We wish to consider the following questions. Given A, how do we compute the order of G? How do we determine if an element lies in G? Assuming , how … Continue reading

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Primality Tests III

Solovay-Strassen Test This is an enhancement of the Euler test. Be forewarned that it is in fact weaker than the Rabin-Miller test so it may not be of much practical interest. Nevertheless, it’s included here for completeness. Recall that to … Continue reading

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Primality Tests II

In this article, we discuss some ways of improving the basic Fermat test. Recall that for Fermat test, to test if n is prime, one picks a base a < n and checks if We also saw that this method would utterly fail … Continue reading

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Primality Tests I

Description of Problem The main problem we wish to discuss is as follows. Question. Given n, how do we determine if  it is prime? Prime numbers have opened up huge avenues in theoretical research – the renowned Riemann Hypothesis, for … Continue reading

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Polynomials and Representations XXXIX

Some Invariant Theory We continue the previous discussion. Recall that for we have a -equivariant map which induces an isomorphism between the unique copies of in both spaces. The kernel Q of this map is spanned by for various fillings T with shape and entries … Continue reading

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