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Patrick Honner

Contributing Columnist

Latest Articles

Quantized Academy

How Rational Math Catches Slippery Irrational Numbers

By Patrick Honner
March 10, 2020
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Finding the best way to approximate the ever-elusive irrational numbers pits the infinitely large against the infinitely small.

Quantized Academy

How Simple Math Can Cover Even the Most Complex Holes

By Patrick Honner
January 8, 2020
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No one knows how to find the smallest shape that can cover all other shapes of a certain width. But high school geometry is getting us closer to an answer.

An illustration of a mathematician staring up at an infinite pile of cubes of varying sizes and colors.
Quantized Academy

Why the Sum of Three Cubes Is a Hard Math Problem

By Patrick Honner
November 5, 2019
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Looking for answers in infinite space is hard. High school math can help narrow your search.

Two competitors are racing to solve the multiplication problem 25 times 63 in two separate lanes of a running track. One competitor is using the standard multiplication algorithm while the other is using Karatsuba method.
Quantized Academy

On Your Mark, Get Set, Multiply

By Patrick Honner
September 23, 2019
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The way you learned to multiply works, but computers employ a faster algorithm.

Art for "Color Me Polynomial"
Quantized Academy

Color Me Polynomial

By Patrick Honner
August 13, 2019
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Polynomials aren’t just exercises in abstraction. They’re good at illuminating structure in surprising places.

Art for "How Geometry, Data and Neighbors Predict Your Favorite Movies"
Quantized Academy

How Geometry, Data and Neighbors Predict Your Favorite Movies

By Patrick Honner
May 22, 2019
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A little high school geometry can help you understand the basic math behind movie recommendation engines.

Art for "Where Proof, Evidence and Imagination Intersect"
Quantized Academy

Where Proof, Evidence and Imagination Intersect

By Patrick Honner
March 14, 2019
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In mathematics, where proofs are everything, evidence is important too. But evidence is only as good as the model, and modeling can be dangerous business. So how much evidence is enough?

Art for "Unscrambling the Hidden Secrets of Superpermutations"
Quantized Academy

Unscrambling the Hidden Secrets of Superpermutations

By Patrick Honner
January 16, 2019
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A science fiction novelist and an internet commenter made breakthroughs on a longstanding problem about the number of ways you can arrange a set of items. What did they discover?

Quantized Academy

The (Imaginary) Numbers at the Edge of Reality

By Patrick Honner
October 25, 2018
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Odd enough to potentially model the strangeness of the physical world, complex numbers with “imaginary” components are rooted in the familiar.


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