Category Archives: Mathematics

Resolution of Toom’s rule paradox

Posted on 5/14/2013 by chb

A few days ago our Ghost Pontiff Dave Bacon wondered how Toom’s noisy but highly fault-tolerant 2-state classical cellular automaton  can get away with violating the Gibbs phase rule, according to which a finite-dimensional locally interacting system, at generic points … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Mathematics, Physics | 5 Comments

Non-chaotic irregularity

Posted on 4/26/2013 by chb

In principle, barring the intervention of chance, identical causes lead to identical effects.  And except in chaotic systems, similar causes lead to similar effects.  Borges’ story “Pierre Menard” exemplifies an extreme version of this idea: an early 20′th century writer … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Physics | Leave a comment

What increases when a self-organizing system organizes itself? Logical depth to the rescue.

Posted on 2/24/2012 by chb

(An earlier version of this post appeared in the latest newsletter of the American Physical Society’s special interest group on Quantum Information.) One of the most grandly pessimistic ideas from the 19th century is that of  “heat death” according to … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, General, Mathematics, Physics, Science | 6 Comments

What are the odds?

Posted on 11/9/2011 by sflammia

Let’s multiply together a bunch of numbers which are less than one and see how small they get! If that sounds like fun, then you’ll love this sleek new infographic (of which the above is just the teaser) posted this morning at … Continue reading →

Posted in Extralusionary Intelligence, Mathematics Basterdizations, Nitpicker's Paradiso, Off The Deep End | 15 Comments

Time After Time

Posted on 5/2/2011 by Pontifex Praeteritorum

Ole Peters was a postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute during the time I was also a postdoc there. In addition to being a world class windsurfer, Ole likes to think about critical phenomena and stochastic processes. And in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Mathematics | 8 Comments

Immanants

Posted on 4/7/2011 by Pontifex Praeteritorum

Recently computer scientist Leslie Valliant won the ACM’s Turing Award, considered one of the most prestigious prizes in computer science. Valliant is famous for many results, not the least of which are his results on the Permanent of a matrix. … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, Mathematics | 5 Comments

A Mathematical Definition of News?

Posted on 12/14/2010 by Pontifex Praeteritorum

Lately I’ve been thinking about the news. Mostly this involves me shouting obscenities at the radio or the internet for wasting my time with news items the depth of which couldn’t drown an ant and whose factual status makes fairy … Continue reading →

Posted in Brainstorming, Extralusionary Intelligence, Fragment, Go Ahead, Waste Your Time, Mathematics, Off The Deep End | 15 Comments

Mandelbrot 1924-2010

Posted on 10/17/2010 by Pontifex Praeteritorum

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a mathematical maverick and curmudgeon extraordinaire has passed away at the age of 85 (NYTimes obit.)  Mandelbrot is most well known for coining the word “fractal” and studying the set which now bears his name, but was … Continue reading →

Posted in Caltech, Mathematics, Nature | 8 Comments