Patrick Stevens

The generally accessible posts of which I am most proud on this website are: Anki as Learning Superpower (how to squeeze a bit more out of your Anki usage) The Ravenous (parody of The Raven) Thinking Styles (about how people think differently to each othe…

This page is a list of restaurants I know to be good, or which I intend to try.

A rather little-known but very easy and high-reward way to sanity-check your property-based tests.

This page is an ongoing history of product comparisons, made informally but blindly.

First-class support for a –dry-run mode makes a tool more maintainable, more testable, and more user-friendly.

Motivating the technique of continuation-passing style, by looking at recursive functions.

An exploration into reaching into the internals of Mathematica to natively evaluate C code.

An incomplete but growing list of things I would make mandatory reading if I were building a software engineering syllabus.

A quick note from Hacker News about how to model in F# something that might look like cyclic dependencies.

A checklist I have used during my regular six-monthly life review.

A cute little exercise in bug-spotting.

A bug I found and reported in Git.

A round of questions I wrote for a Christmas quiz.

My notes on the production of a Christmas dinner.

Some techniques to help you get more out of Anki.

A quick note from Hacker News about a neat fact from general relativity.

A quick note from Hacker News about why we want optional types but why ’null’ is unintuitive.

A quick note from Hacker News about a beautiful proof of the uncountability of the reals.

How to write loops immutably and safely.

A quick note from Hacker News about my preference for static config rather than dynamic.

An underappreciated tool for writing good software.

Photos from the Mystery Hunt.

A couple of solution documents I made during the progress of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt.

A quick note from Hacker News about my thoughts on teaching cookery.

A quick note from Hacker News about the various stages of learning and teaching in mathematics.

A couple of solution documents I made during the progress of the 2019 MIT Mystery Hunt.

Notes from a chat with the creator of F#, about how to contribute to the compiler.

A quick overview of dependent types.

A quick note from Hacker News about why the comment-handling situation in JSON is bad.

Answering the question, “What is lost when we move from the reals to the complex numbers?”.

Answering the question, “Which mathematical ideas took a long time to define rigorously?”.

Answering the question, “Are these examples of abuses of notation?”.

Answering the question, “does the International Maths Olympiad help research mathematics?”.

This is just a link to a beautiful proof of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality.

Answering the question, “Why does WolframAlpha say that a quantity is ComplexInfinity?”.

Answering the question, “how far back in time would maths be understandable to a modern mathematician?”.

The story of Martin’s search for a kaki fruit.

Being a beginner at something is great, especially if it’s something that humans are built for.

Now that my time in Part III is over, I feel justified in releasing my essay, which is on the subject of Non-standard Analysis.

Why jargon is a really useful thing to have and use.

A quick overview of the definition of the mathematical concept of finitistic reducibility.

Most recent exposition: an article on Tennenbaum’s Theorem.

I’ve written a blurb about what a modular machine is (namely, another Turing-equivalent form of computing machine), and how a Turing machine may be simulated in one.

So you’ve heard that the Axiom of Choice is magical and special and unprovable and independent of set theory, and you’re here to work out what that means.

Recall the Monty Hall problem: the host, Monty Hall, shows you three doors, named A, B and C.

I’ve been trying to learn Clojure through Exercism, a programming exercises tool.

Answering the question, “Why does a continued fraction containing only 1, subtraction, and division result in one of two complex numbers?”.

Another short post to point out my new article on the Friedberg-Muchnik theorem, a theorem from computability theory.

Just a post to draw attention to my new article about representable functors and their links to adjoint functors.

I’m clearing out my desktop again, and found this document on the multiplicativity of the determinant, which I wrote in 2014.