Matthew Aldridge

Let $X_1, X_2, \dots, X_n$ be independent random variables, each with mean at most 1.

“A Change Is Gonna Come” “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” the Apollo program Barbara Stanwyck Bob Dylan Calvin Trillin Claude Shannon and information theory Different Trains Do The Right Thing Dwight Garner’s book reviews Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks eggs Ben…

Here’s a cute little paper: it’s called “Generalization of Marion’s theorem: volumes of central polytopes obtained by trisecting the edges of simplices” by Yu.

I have been enjoying reading through (and arguing with!)

Being the second in a series of blogposts quite unnecessarily scolding the reader about the binomial coefficient (Previously: “Don’t write the binomial coefficient as n!

Recap In my last blogpost, I looked for a discrete version of the exponential function \[\exp(x) = \frac{x^0}{0!}

Here’s a question that came into my mind as I was falling asleep last night: What’s the discrete equivalent of the exponential function $\exp(x) = \mathrm{e}^x$?

The binomial coefficient $\binom{n}{k}$, pronounced “$n$ choose $k$”, is the number of ways of choosing a collection of $k$ objects from a set of $n$ objects.

You keep rolling a dice until you get a six: how many rolls does this take?

Belfast and the northern coast of Northern Ireland, 3–6 August 2025