The current puzzle is the last one before the summer break and not exciting enough to take along: Take the first ten digits, create five pairs out of those, and for each pair (x,y) derive the quantity (min(x,y)+1.5max(x,y)). What is the collection of pairs that maximises the product of those quantities? I wrote the following […]
I have a new book arriving at stores this week. It’s titled Numbersense: How to Use Big Data to Your Advantage. If you read this blog, you’d have a good idea what the book is about. I analyze claims made in the media that are supported by analyses of data. I show you how I dissect these claims to decide whether they are credible, or they are bogus. The ability…
Predictive Analytics by Eric Siegel (link) was published earlier this year. Siegel is a consultant and organizer of a series of popular industry conferences, which I attend with some regularity. I recommend this book for readers who want to understand the current state of “data science” at a deeper level than the New York Times’s but still nonmathematical. If you want to measure against my own writing, then Siegel spends…
Yet another puzzle which first part does not require R programming, even though it is a programming question in essence: Given five real numbers x1,…,x5, what is the minimal number of pairwise comparisons needed to rank them? Given 33 real numbers, what is the minimal number of pairwise comparisons required to find the three largest ones? […]
A rather dull puzzle this week: Show that, for any integer y, (√3-1)2y+(√3+1)2y is an integer multiple of a power of two. I just have to apply Newton’s binomial theorem to obtain the result. What’s the point?! Filed under: Books, Kids...
For once Le Monde math puzzle is much more easily solved on a piece of paper than in R, even in a plane from Roma: Given a partition of the set {1,…,N} in k groups, one considers the collection of all subsets of the set {1,…,N} containing at least one element from each group. Show […]
In a paper arXived on Friday, Roberto Fontana relates the generation of Sudoku grids to the one of Latin squares (which is unsurprising) and to maximum cliques of a graph (more surprising). The generation of a random Latin square proceeds in three steps: generate a random Latin square L with identity permutation matrix on symbol […]
I will be at Book Expo this Friday signing books at the McGraw-Hill booth. If you're in NYC, drop by and say hi between 11 and 12. Yes, it's a new book! The title is Numbersense: How to Use Big Data to Your Advantage (link). If you read my blogs, you already know where I'm going with this. How can we be smart consumers of data analyses in a world…
The current puzzle is… puzzling: Given the set {1,…,N} with N<61, one iterates the following procedure: take (x,y) within the set and replace the pair with the smallest divider of x+y (bar 1). What are the values of N such that the final value in the set is 61? I find it puzzling because the […]
Here is the cover of the Japanese translation of our Introducing Monte Carlo methods with R book. A few year after the French translation. It actually appeared last year in August but I was not informed of this till a few weeks ago. The publisher is Maruzen, with an associated webpage if you want to […]
