intellect

This Is Only A Test...

We stood silently on the platform waiting blindly for the J Caught in an emotional storm screens humming like drizzling rain

The Hailstone Problem: A Simple Puzzle Nobody Can Prove

Introduction Some mathematical problems require years of study before you can even understand the question. The Collatz conjecture is different. You can explain it to a child in less than a minute, try it with a pencil, and immediately see why people find it fascinating.

The Four Twos Puzzle That Paul Dirac Took Too Far

Introduction Write the digit 2 four times on a piece of paper. Your challenge is to place mathematical operations between the digits and make other numbers. You must use exactly four twos in each answer, although the operations you are allowed to use depend on the rules you agree beforehand.

Richard Feynman, the Safe Cracker

Introduction In a secret laboratory in New Mexico, some of the world’s finest scientists were working on the most dangerous weapon ever conceived. Armed guards watched the entrances, letters were checked, and the project’s very existence was concealed from the public. Yet Richard Feynman discovered that sensitive papers could be far easier to reach than anyone wanted to believe.

Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Man Who Seemed to Understand Infinity

Introduction In January 1913, the Cambridge mathematician Godfrey H. Hardy received an extraordinary letter from an unknown clerk working in Madras. The letter contained pages of mathematical formulas, many of which appeared without proofs or explanations.

George Green: The Miller Who Helped Create Modern Mathematical Physics

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Everyone had forgotten everything, because their phones told them what they needed to know. When you have a device that remebers for you, you don;t need to remember, and your mind surrenders its knowledge to the thing in your hand.

John Torrence Tate Jr: The Mathematician Who Built Bridges Across the World of Numbers

Introduction Some mathematicians become famous for solving one celebrated problem. John Torrence Tate Jr followed a different path because he created ideas, methods and mathematical structures that helped thousands of other researchers solve their own problems.

In the Flow of His Life's Sweeping Existence

In the flow of life's sweeping existence, there is a silhouetted discovery that surges through the plains of my independent fight. It is much lighter weighted, adrift with vibrant new life: an antidote to the fallen stars that haunt the raindrops of my stubborn sky, digestible across the new plains of my existence. It pulses in a space I'd sweep with the breadth of ecstasy, infinite yet cumulative to the wonders of a universe that never ceases. If this yet to reach discovery withstands the bonds of time and wraps the light of my breadth's trails in a cherished trove, let it be. It will satiate the deep emptiness that swirls within like hot, triple-smoked rings, doubting the very silhouette of a future that I avoid.

The Busy Beaver Game and the Turing Machine

Introduction The Busy Beaver game sounds like a harmless puzzle involving an unusually industrious animal. In reality, it is one of the strangest and most profound problems in mathematics and computer science.

The Idiotic Tango With "AI"

Introduction This is just some observations about systems probably driven by so called AI that almost always screw up, and then blame you and leave you to pick up the pieces.

We Don't Know the Way...

I unplugged my phone, rolled onto my side, and tapped the small blue icon. That dotted white chat bubble was supposed to open last night’s conversation, where my unfinished draft sat waiting. Instead, nothing happened. The home screen wouldn't let me into the world I craved so desperately—the one I had conditioned myself to need. It just stared back at me, frozen. Forever stuck. Forever waiting. Forever gone.