Articles
Ideas from science and engineering, built up from everyday experience: the question each one answers, why it works, and where it stops working.
- Dimensional analysis from first principlesA swing four times as long doesn't take four times as long. Why size changes some things and not others, and what it takes for a small model to behave like the real thing.Interactive explainerPhysicsAbout 14 minutes
- Tensors from first principlesDraw a circle on a sheet of rubber and pull it one way. Lines you never pulled on change too. What is a tensor? The rule that predicts every one of them.Interactive explainerMechanicsAbout 16 minutes
- Gaussian processes from first principlesYou know the height of the ground at five places along a path. How a Gaussian process estimates it everywhere else, and how unsure it is, built up from two correlated numbers.Interactive explainerMachine learningAbout 15 minutes