My name is Lê and I believe that the greatest challenge in education is to make science and math appealing.
This is why I aim at bringing enthusiasm and excitement to the readers’ learning experience.
I now run a Robustly Beneficial wiki, mostly on AI ethics, which has come to fascinate me!
The Tortuous Geometry of the Flat TorusThe Tortuous Geometry of the Flat Torus By Lê Nguyên Hoang | Updated:2015-12 | Views: 17572 Take a square sheet of paper. Can you glue opposite sides without ever folding the paper? This is a conundrum that many of the greatest modern mathematicians, like Gauss, Riemann, and Mandelbrot, couldn't figure out. While John Nash did answer yes, he couldn't say how. After 160 years of research, Vincent Borrelli and his collaborators have finally provided a revolutionary and breathtaking example of a bending of a square sheet of paper! And it is spectacularly beautiful!
Euclidean Geometry and NavigationEuclidean Geometry and Navigation By Scott McKinney | Updated:2020-07 | Views: 6870 This is the first of a series of three posts. In this post we'll see how the Greeks developed a system of geometry - literally "Earth measure" - to assist with planetary navigation. We then will see why their assumption that the Earth is flat means that Euclidean geometry is insufficient for studying the Earth. The Earth's spherical surface looks flat from our perspective, but is actually qualitatively different from a flat surface. In the ensuing posts, we'll see why this implies that it is impossible to make a perfectly accurate map of the Earth, and build on this idea to get a glimpse into Einstein's revolutionary theories regarding the geometry of the space-time universe.
Hypothesis Test with Statistics: Get it Right!Hypothesis Test with Statistics: Get it Right! By Lê Nguyên Hoang | Updated:2016-02 | Views: 4318 Statistician Johnson recently claimed that up to 25% of published scientific experimental results were just wrong! To see why, let's get to the bottom of the scientific method! And it's probably more complicated than you think. In this article, we apply it rigorously to "prove" $\pi=3$. This will highlight the actually mechanism of the scientific method, its limits, and how much messages of experiments are often deformed!
The Massive Puzzles of GravityThe Massive Puzzles of Gravity By Lê Nguyên Hoang | Updated:2016-02 | Views: 3903 This article follows the footsteps of the giants of physics that have moulded our current understanding of gravity. It is a series of brilliant inspirations, usually accompanied by deceiving misconceptions. After all, even today, gravity is still a slippery concept.
The Magic of AlgebraThe Magic of Algebra By Lê Nguyên Hoang | Updated:2016-02 | Views: 3548 The power of algebra lies in abstraction, and abstraction is basically forgetting. By retracing the History of algebra from its roots to more recent advancements, this article unveils the numerous breakthrough in our understanding of the world, by abusing of the power of forgetting.
Logarithms and Age CountingLogarithms and Age Counting By Lê Nguyên Hoang | Updated:2015-12 | Views: 7025 Amusingly, the age difference between a 45-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman doesn't seem as big as the age difference between them 20 years earlier, when the woman was a little 5-year-old girl. This remark was the insight the late science popularizer Albert Jacquart liked to give to his readers to explain logarithms. This article pays tribute to the great scientist by introducing age difference as he liked to tell it.
The Harmonious Mathematics of MusicThe Harmonious Mathematics of Music By Lê Nguyên Hoang | Updated:2015-12 | Views: 12723 It was when hearing the sounds of hammers that Pythagoras realized the ubiquity of numbers in mathematical harmony. He would go on laying down the mathematical foundations of music, based on octaves, perfect fifths and major thirds. This mathematics of music would then become the favourite playground of all musicians, from Beethoven to Gangnam Style.
Cryptography and Number TheoryCryptography and Number Theory By Scott McKinney | Updated:2016-01 | Views: 14011 Over 300 years ago, a mathematician named Fermat discovered a subtle property about prime numbers. In the 1970's, three mathematicians at MIT showed that his discovery could be used to formulate a remarkably powerful method for encrypting information to be sent online. The RSA algorithm, as it is known, is used to secure ATM transactions, online business, banking, and even electronic voting. Surprisingly, it's not too difficult to understand, so let's see how it works.
The Tortuous Geometry of the Flat Torus
