Math for Hackers 2.0

Dear friends!

Since the first meetup went so swimmingly, I hereby announce the second fortnightly gathering of aspiring uber-Math-h4x0rz.

This week we will be discussing Geometry--a magical world of points, lines, curves, surfaces, and bunnies [I promise, there will be bunnies]. Prepare to be blown away by spirals, hyperbolic dimensions, and non-Euclidean spaces galore! This is going to be a swift and satisfying breadth-wide coverage of as many geometric concepts as can fit in such a short period of time.

We'll also be having a short guest presentation from the brilliant Blake West, who has engineered a clever graph theory based solution to a piano fingering algorithm.

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In case you missed the first round, here's the copy-pasta description from the last event:

Mathematics is the underlying language describing all of computation, the father of computer science itself. Each programming language is a construction of mathematical rules and systems of logic.

But everyone is terrified of math. What gives?

I posit that math education, from kindergarten through graduate level is, for 99.99% of people, misdirected, broken, and worthless.

Mathematics at its core is a creative exploration, in which the playground itself is the world we live in--subtle patterns and relations describing our universe, hidden away in an underlying framework of esoteric symbols and sprawling equations.

Math doesn't need to be hidden and inaccessible, left only for the academically devoted. It doesn't need to be awkward graphing calculators, illegible proofs, and frustrating arithmetic processes that seem impractical, disconnected, and tedious.

The primary endeavor of humanity for at least the past century [I would warrant for all of human history] has been to build increasingly powerful adding machines. Our computers are equipped to run arithmetic computations billions of times faster than the best of us.

Nearly every math class I've taken constituted relentless repetition and regurgitation of algorithms which, at its core, are just addition. Let's stop doing the arithmetic, and move into novel territory.

This meetup is meant for hackers and software engineers to explore high level mathematical concepts--subjects generally restricted to the graduate level--without any requisite understanding of math.

This first week, I will be breaking Graph Theory free from the cloisters of graduate academia through Mathematica. The language itself a great instructional tool, specialized for rapidly prototyping and visualizing mathematical concepts by using a symbolic, rule-based, functional paradigm.

Come one, come all, and remember: Keep it functional, my friends!

<3 <3

• Andrew