Viewing profile — lkozma

My favorite artistic illustration is probably Jorge Stolfi's drawing inspired by the self-adjusting splay tree data structure of Sleator and Tarjan: https://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/spl…

Yes, this efficiency-aspect is not captured in the illustration -- while splitting perfectly _by index_ comes for free, splitting perfectly _by value_ needs nontrivial work (median…

May I add one that I made? Illustration of QuickSort and MergeSort as two sides of the same coin: http://lkozma.net/images/sort/duality.pdf I find this somehow both obvious and cou…

Socrates supposedly loved going to the market. When his students asked him about this, Socrates replied, "I love to go and see all the things I am happy without." :)

This is a very nice and deep question. Are you aware of the published research on the problem? The growth rate is indeed around 4 and now known to be strictly above 4: https://page…

"Seeing an astronomer using a telescope to observe a galaxy, no-one will confuse the telescope with the galaxy. Mathematics differs from science in that there is no clear distincti…

You are right in general, but when the quote is from someone on whose research the result builds in an important way (as it is the case here), I would say it is fair.

Your first point is correct, but just to clarify your second point, these two definitions are not quite equivalent, as there is a world of functions growing more quickly than log^k…

Who is pushing/lobbying for that type of legislation? Isn't it a case of regulation helping the incumbents?

For those coming from a CS background a possible (crude) intuition sometimes given is that frequentist :: Bayesian ~ worst-case analysis :: average-case analysis There are a good r…

Honest question: who does it harm? These aspects that you mention may not be to your (or to my) taste, but if they are relatively harmless and the other stuff is overwhelmingly goo…

was posted here sometime ago: The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. A…

> The Soviets royally sucked in the computation department To add more nuance, there is an essay [1] telling the history of early maximum flow algorithms and includes this small an…