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January

Even a mind as great as Huygens did not understand second derivatives. He asked Leibniz why they were worth learning

Christiaan Huygens was a giant indeed. Amongst many other things, he was the first (we know of) who used an algebraic equation to describe physical phenomena. markvdloo

Funny how you sometimes see the same ideas in different ways over a few days. This wonderful lecture on Nash’s work by Cédric Villani talks about the difficulty understanding higher order derivatives in the ~4 min section starting around 22:00Mike Lawler.

“I still do not understand anything about ddx, and I would like to know if you have encountered any important problems where they should be used, so that this gives me desire to study them.” — Huygens.

June

August

An organism’s irreducible behavior should match the irreducible problems it faces.Irreducibility of behavior is another way to capture the “scale” of a system without recourse to low-dimensional coherent behavior.

October

November

December