Story Time Linear algebra was founded around the same time as Calculus (think Leibniz, circa 1700) solely for the purpose of solving general systems of linear equations. The coefficients of a system were written in a grid form, with rows corresponding to equations and columns to the unknown variables.

The Web as a Graph The goal of this post is to assign an “importance score” $ x_i \in [0,1]$ to each of a set of web pages indexed $ v_i$ in a way that consistently captures our idea of which websites are likely to be important. But before we can extract information from the structure of the internet, we need to have a mathematical description of that structure. Enter graph theory.

The Quest to Capture Speed Companies and researchers spend hundreds of millions of dollars for the fruits of their algorithms. Whether one is indexing websites on the internet for search, folding proteins, or figuring out which warehouse is the most cost-effective to ship a product from, improvements in algorithm speed save immense amounts of money.

Binary Search Binary search is perhaps the first and most basic nontrivial algorithm a student learns. For the mathematicians out there, binary search is a fast procedure to determine whether a sorted list contains a particular element.

The goal of this post is to use prime numbers to make interesting and asymmetric graphics, and to do so in the context of the web design language CSS. Number Patterns For the longest time numbers have fascinated mathematicians and laymen alike. Patterns in numbers are decidedly simple to recognize, and the proofs of these patterns range from trivially elegant to Fields Medal worthy.

Importance on the Web As a society living in the “Information Age,” it comes as no surprise that we are faced with the task of sorting through vast oceans of content. With the admission that most content is actually junk, we must wisely choose the objects of our analysis.