Math ∩ Programming
- Attention spans for math and stories
Editor’s note: This essay was originally published in 2019. I have made minor edits in this republishing. There was a MathOverflow thread about mathematically interesting games for 5–6 year olds. A lot of the discussion revolved around how young age 5 really is, and how we should temper expectations because we don’t really remember what it’s like to be 5. In response to an enormous answer by Alexander Chervov, user LSpice quipped, “‘Daddy, daddy, let’s play another in the infinite indexed family of perfect-information draw-free cheap-to-construct two-player games! - Carnival of Mathematics #233
Welcome to the 233rd Carnival of Mathematics! Who can forget 233, the 6th Fibonacci prime? Hey, not all numbers are interesting. Don’t ask me about the smallest positive uninteresting number. You can’t make it interesting with your feeble mind tricks! Anyway, on to the fun. Provers and Shakers The big discovery this month was a new largest known prime number, $2^{136279841} - 1$, as reported by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. - How This Blog Does IndieWeb
This article will explain how the blog is organized at a technical level, and show how I implemented various IndieWeb features. Table of Contents: Motivation Structure and Deployment Static search index Running scripts via GitHub Actions Social media syndication and the “shortform” section Links to syndicated versions at the end of each post Warning for a too-long first paragraph Triggering this workflow automatically after deployment Blogroll (the “What I’m Reading” page) Chrome extension Webmentions and referencing external discussion threads Bridgy Hacker News backlinks Outgoing webmentions DOIs Dead link checker Motivation Earlier this year I migrated this blog off Wordpress to the Hugo static site generator. - Packing Matrix-Vector Multiplication in Fully Homomorphic Encryption
In my recent overview of homomorphic encryption, I underemphasized the importance of data layout when working with arithmetic (SIMD-style) homomorphic encryption schemes. In the FHE world, the name given to data layout strategies is called “packing,” because it revolves around putting multiple plaintext data into RLWE ciphertexts in carefully-chosen ways that mesh well with the operations you’d like to perform. By “mesh well” I mean it reduces the number of extra multiplications and rotations required merely to align data elements properly, rather than doing the actual computation you care about. - Shift Networks
In my recent overview of homomorphic encryption, I underemphasized the importance of data layout when working with arithmetic (SIMD-style) homomorphic encryption schemes. In the FHE world, the name given to data layout strategies is called “packing,” because it revolves around putting multiple plaintext data into RLWE ciphertexts in carefully-chosen ways that mesh well with the operations you’d like to perform. By “mesh well” I mean it reduces the number of extra multiplications and rotations required merely to align data elements properly, rather than doing the actual computation you care about. - MLIR — Defining Patterns with PDLL
Table of Contents In this article I’ll show how to use PDLL, a tool for defining MLIR patterns, which itself is built with MLIR. PDLL is intended to be a replacement for defining patterns in tablegen, though there are few public examples of its use. In fact, the main impetus for PDLL is that tablegen makes it difficult to express things like: Operations that return multiple results Operations with regions Operations with variadic operands Arithmetic on static values While not all these features are fully supported in PDLL yet, they are within scope of the language and tooling. - Fully Homomorphic Encryption in Production Systems
In this living document, I will list all production systems I’m aware of that use fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). For background on FHE, see my overview of the field. If you have any information about production FHE systems not in this list, or corrections to information in this list, please send me an email with sufficient detail allow the claim to be publicly verified. For all production deployments, I will distinguish between cases where the deployed system does “fully” homomorphic encryption (with bootstrapping), aka FHE, and “somewhat” homomorphic encryption, aka SHE (avoiding bootstrapping). - A High-Level Technical Overview of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
About two years ago, I switched teams at Google to focus on fully homomorphic encryption (abbreviated FHE, or sometimes HE). Since then I’ve got to work on a lot of interesting projects, learning along the way about post-quantum cryptography, compiler design, and the ins and outs of fully homomorphic encryption. If you’ve heard about FHE and you’re a software person, you’ve probably heard two things: it lets you run programs directly on encrypted data without ever decrypting it; and it’s still too slow to be useful for anything. - Unusual Tips for Parenting Toddlers
It’s April Cools! Last year I wrote about friendship bracelets and the year before about cocktails. This year it’s parenting. Parenting articles are a dime a dozen and always bury the lede behind a long story. I’ll skip that. How to think about your child and your role as a parent These are framing devices. Concrete things to do to work toward these are in the next section. I will refer to the numbers for each action to show what principle it is applying. - Tabletop Games Based on Math Problems
There’s a family of tabletop games that are based directly on a nontrivial mathematics problem. As a casual and fun way to inaugurate my new blog (migrated from Wordpress to Hugo, after my work on getting better LaTeX mathmode support in Hugo), I thought I’d write a short listicle about them, so that I have a place to add more as I find them, as well as give the shortest canonical description of the associated math problem.