In my newsletter I give an introduction to the latest few posts and occasionally give some additional commentary. In my latest newsletter I wrote Projective space and homogeneous coordinates seemed like arbitrary abstractions when I was a student because they were presented without any motivation. Much later I came to realize that they’re natural, almost […]

The post Making peace with the projective plane first appeared on John D. Cook.

I wrote several posts on poles and polars a few days ago. First, I wrote about the dual of a spherical triangle, called the polar triangle. Then I wrote about poles and polars in plane geometry and briefly mentioned the extension to projective geometry. Poles and polars are a little awkward in the plane because […]

The post A unified view of poles and polars first appeared on John D. Cook.

The classification of finite simple groups (CFSG) has been called the biggest theorem in mathematics. It is big, not necessarily in terms of its importance, but in the sense that its proof developed over the course of decades and thousands of pages of journal articles. Two days ago Axiom announced it had formalized the proof […]

The post The Unbalanced Group Theorem first appeared on John D. Cook.

If you have an expression in n Boolean variables, how long does it take to find out whether some assignment of values to the variables makes the expression true? There is an obvious upper bound: you can find out in 2n steps by exhaustive search, trying all possible ways of setting each variable to true […]

The post The Exponential Time Hypothesis is False first appeared on John D. Cook.

The previous three post have been part of a series on geometric duality. The traditional but somewhat mysterious terminology is the pole of a line and the polar of a point. As explained here, the terminology was first coined in the context of spherical geometry where the term “pole” makes sense. It was then extended to the […]

The post Inversion in an ellipse first appeared on John D. Cook.

This blog is the main place I write, but I also use other platforms, either to write new content or to announce blog posts. X (née Twitter) I have a several X accounts, one personal account (@JohnDCook) and several specialized accounts (@CompSciFact, @AlgebraFact, @DataSciFact, etc.). I announce new blog posts on the most relevant account. RSS […]

The post Where else to find me first appeared on John D. Cook.

The previous two posts have been about polar triangles. The first used a polar triangle to derive a theorem, and the second showed how to compute polars using linear algebra. But what exactly is a polar triangle and why is it called that? Poles and polars on a sphere Let’s start with a sphere S and a […]

The post Poles and polars first appeared on John D. Cook.

The previous post defined the polar triangle of a spherical triangle in terms of its sides and angles, but it doesn’t construct the triangle. It only specifies one of a family of triangles located anywhere on the sphere. How do we know that polar triangles exist? There is a geometric construction that starts with a […]

The post Computing polar triangles with linear algebra first appeared on John D. Cook.

I’ve written before about the law of cosines on a sphere: cos(c) = cos(a) cos(b) + sin(a) sin(b) cos(C). But that’s just one of two laws of cosines on a sphere. The equation above is the law of cosines for sides. The law of cosines for angles is typographically very similar, just inverting the case of […]

The post Duality in spherical trigonometry first appeared on John D. Cook.

A Python script that worked a few days ago wouldn’t work today. I suspect it might have something to do with my updating everything I could think of in response to recent security breaches. I got an error message that said error: The script contains multiple PEP 723 metadata blocks I searched on what that […]

The post Working around a strange Python problem first appeared on John D. Cook.

You may have seen references to a password being the number 4. There are countless allusions to this online, but they don’t give the context. As I mentioned in an earlier post, eMudrha was using the numbers 4, 56, 115, 155, 156, 230, and 237 as secret keys. I haven’t seen details of how this […]

The post How the eMudrha certificate debacle might have happened first appeared on John D. Cook.

An elliptic curve E over a finite field F consists of the set of points (x, y) satisfying the equation y² = x³ + ax + b with x and y in F. Typically in cryptography the field F is the integers mod p where p is a very large prime number. The number of points on E is roughly the number […]

The post The number of points on an elliptic curve first appeared on John D. Cook.

The NIST elliptic curves have been in the news twice lately. A few days ago Anthropic posted a paper on the NIST curve seeds that I wrote about here. Now the curves are in the news again, this time over broken certificates. My post a few days ago was about the possibility that the NSA […]

The post Backdoors, Incompetence, and Elliptic Curves first appeared on John D. Cook.

I was watching a video by John Higgins this morning about the poem in Ecclesiastes 3, one of the most famous passages in the Bible. There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and […]

The post Deliberate imperfection first appeared on John D. Cook.

Splitting N! into N factors is trivial. It’s defined as the product of N integers, the integers 1 through N. Can you still split N! into N factors if you put a minimum size requirement on the factors? You can’t split 3! into three factors unless one of the factors is 1, but you can split 4! into factors ≥ 2: 4! […]

The post Refactoring factorials first appeared on John D. Cook.

Many words can be spelled by stringing together chemical symbols. For example, sarcasm can be written S Ar Ca Sm using the symbols for sulfur, argon, calcium, and samarium. How would you write a program to determine whether a word can be written by stringing together chemical element abbreviations ignoring case? Obviously this isn’t a […]

The post A frivolous problem with a deeper lesson first appeared on John D. Cook.

NIST published a set of elliptic curves for cryptography in 2000. The seeds for the curves were supplied by the NSA, and cryptographers suspected the agency may have installed backdoors in the curves. And not without reason: the NSA did insert a backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. Two days ago researchers at Anthropic […]

The post Cloud of suspicion lifted from NIST curves first appeared on John D. Cook.

I mentioned in the previous post that I watched 2010: The Year We Make Contact last night and got nerd-sniped by the mention of Lagrange points at the beginning. I got nerd-sniped again in a scene describing a password. The instructions are Put in nine nines, take the square root and press the integer. I […]

The post Movie password first appeared on John D. Cook.

This post began as a thread on X last night. I’ve edited the thread to turn it into a blog post, making some additions and corrections. I’m watching 2010: The Year We Make Contact. The movie opens saying the monolith is located at the Lagrange point between Jupiter and Io. I got nerd sniped and […]

The post Monoliths and Lagrange Points first appeared on John D. Cook.

When I wrote about the harmonic triangle yesterday, I displayed the triangle left-aligned using fixed-width text because that was easier than producing the format you usually see for Pascal’s triangle and related triangles. 1 1/2 1/2 1/3 1/6 1/3 1/4 1/12 1/12 1/4 1/5 1/20 1/30 1/20 1/5 … I asked Claude to write a […]

The post LaTeX package for Pascal-like triangles first appeared on John D. Cook.

G. D. Chakerian [1] discovered the following generalization of the Pythagorean theorem. Take any triangle and attach squares to each side. From each triangle vertex, extend a line perpendicular to the opposite side and extend the line through the square, as shown in the figure below. Then the areas of the rectangles with the same […]

The post A generalization of the Pythagorean theorem first appeared on John D. Cook.

What’s a connection between Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel? Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum describes a pendulum with a semicircular blade being lowered on a cable. This is an interesting variation on the usual harmonic oscillator because the length L of the pendulum is not constant but rather an increasing function […]

The post Poe, Bessel, and Drones first appeared on John D. Cook.

Pascal’s triangle is the most famous triangular arrangement of numbers. I’ve written about other numerical triangles, such as Bell’s triangle and the trinomial triangle. There’s another well-known triangle that somehow I never heard of until recently: the harmonic triangle, first explored by Leibniz around 1700. To create the harmonic triangle, start with the harmonic series […]

The post Harmonic triangle first appeared on John D. Cook.

A few days ago I wrote about topological models of modal logic. If you find general topology more familiar than modal logic, this correspondence could be helpful. If you think the motivation for general topology is evident but the motivation for modal logic is suspect, the correspondence between the two fields might relieve some of […]

The post Categorical models of logics first appeared on John D. Cook.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you may know that I do a lot of work with data privacy and that I have an interest in modal logic. Recently these two worlds collided: I became aware of work that uses modal logic to reason about data privacy. The story begins with Helen Nissenbaum’s […]

The post Privacy policies and modal logic first appeared on John D. Cook.

The Riemann Hypothesis (RH) is the conjecture that all the zeros of the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) in the critical strip, i.e. the region of the complex plane with real part between 0 and 1, have real part equal to ½. The Quasi Riemann Hypothesis (QRH) says that there exists a constant θ < 1 […]

The post Consequences of progress toward the Riemann Hypothesis first appeared on John D. Cook.

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm can compute the discrete Fourier transform of a sequence of length n in time O(n log n). OpenAI recently posted a paper saying there is an algorithm that could compute the discrete Fourier transform in O(n (log n)1 − ε) time for ε = 10−13. This result is amazing. It seemed that […]

The post Faster Fourier Transform first appeared on John D. Cook.

For a real number x, the irrationality index μ(x) is a way of measuring how well x can be approximated by rational numbers. If x is rational, μ(x) = 1. If x is irrational, μ(x) ≥ 2. OpenAI recently published a proof that μ(π) = 2. Almost all real numbers have irrationality exponent 2, so the new result says […]

The post Irrationality exponent of π first appeared on John D. Cook.

I was skimming through David Well’s book The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry and was surprised by this entry: Lissajous figures or Bowditch curves First discussed by Nathaniel Bowditch in 1815, and later by Jules Antoine Lissajous in 1857 … I wrote a couple posts about Lissajous curves years ago, and recently I wrote […]

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Gödel’s incompleteness theorem illustrated the need to distinguish between what is true and what is provable. There are true statements that cannot be proven. Let □p denote the assertion that p is provable in Peano arithmetic. The logic with this interpretation for the □ operator is the Gödel-Löb logic, also called provability logic. This is a […]

The post A topological model for provability logic first appeared on John D. Cook.