machine learning math

A ten-minute clip of Richard Feynman describing how mathematicians and physicists differ in their interests and customs. He argues physics rests on visualizing and applying math rather than pure abstraction.

Gregory Chaitin is interviewed on Closer To Truth about whether mathematics is invented or discovered. He gives a nuanced view that ties the question to the nature of reality.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Andy Matuschak on how he learns, why memorization matters for understanding, and why most learning tools fail. The conversation also covers handling confusion and the role of tutoring.

Chamath Palihapitiya talks with Jason Calacanis about how he bought into the mythology of Silicon Valley, which he calls a Ponzi scheme, and about rebuilding Social Capital. He urges founders to grow slowly and build what matters.

A 13-minute clip from This Week in Startups in which Chamath Palihapitiya describes venture capital as a Ponzi-like scheme driven by fees and inflated valuations among VCs.

Chamath Palihapitiya's Stanford GSB View From The Top talk on money as an instrument of change. HN mostly knows it for his remarks on social media's dopamine-driven feedback loops and regrets about Facebook.

A TED interview in which Chris Anderson talks with Jim Simons about his life: code-breaking, math, founding Renaissance Technologies, and his philanthropy in math education and origins-of-life research.

A long Machine Learning Street Talk interview with Kenneth Stanley, creator of NEAT and novelty search, about his book on why greatness cannot be planned. They discuss open-endedness, the tyranny of objectives, serendipity and the evolution of ideas.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Avie Tevanian covering his math talent, work on the Mach microkernel at CMU, joining NeXT, leading NEXTSTEP development and the 1996 Apple acquisition.

Persi Diaconis explains on Numberphile the mathematics of card shuffling, including why seven riffle shuffles are needed to randomize a deck and how different shuffles compare.

The full-length Numberphile interview with mathematician and hedge fund founder Jim Simons. He discusses his path from mathematics and codebreaking to founding Renaissance Technologies, his use of algorithms in markets, and his philanthropy.

A 2023 University of Toronto conversation between Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li on responsible AI development. They look back at the history of deep learning and ImageNet and discuss the ethics and risks of AI.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Richard Sutton, reinforcement learning pioneer, Turing Award winner and author of The Bitter Lesson. Sutton argues LLMs are a dead end because they cannot learn on the job, and that continual learning from experience will require a new architecture.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Andrej Karpathy on why reinforcement learning is flawed, why AGI may blend into steady GDP growth, why self-driving took so long, and the future of education. The conversation runs about two and a half hours.

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta and author of On Intelligence, about the Thousand Brains Theory and reverse-engineering the neocortex. They also cover Hierarchical Temporal Memory and brain-inspired AI architectures.

A Numberphile interview with Donald Knuth about how he came to write the first book on surreal numbers after a lunch with John Conway. He tells the story casually in about 14 minutes.

A 42-minute CBS interview with Geoffrey Hinton at the Vector Institute in 2023, covering the history of neural networks and the present and future of AI. He discusses AGI timelines and whether language models truly understand.

John Conway talks in a short Numberphile interview about his mixed feelings toward the Game of Life, his most famous invention. He says he is not especially pleased that it overshadowed his other work.

Freeman Dyson recounts how Enrico Fermi rejected his team's meson scattering model, noting that it had too many free parameters. It is the source of the quote about fitting an elephant.

Mike Acton, in a HandmadeCon 2015 interview with Casey Muratori, discusses game engine development, hiring and learning on your own.

A short excerpt from a 1973 Yorkshire TV film in which Richard Feynman explains that knowing the name of something is not the same as knowing it.

A 1985 interview by G. Edward Griffin with former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov. He describes long-running Soviet efforts at ideological subversion and manipulation of US public opinion.

Numberphile talks with mathematician Ron Graham about the magnitude of Graham's number, building up from arrow notation to show how impossibly large it is. It is part of a series of videos on this number.

An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.

A BSD Now episode featuring a long interview with Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill on dtrace, ZFS, pkgsrc, containers and more. It includes his rant on why Linux epoll is flawed and stories from Sun.

A two-minute video of Ira Glass on the creative process, describing the gap between taste and skill when starting out and urging you to keep producing until your work matches your taste.

Sal Khan interviews Elon Musk in a 2013 Khan Academy entrepreneurship series. Musk discusses PayPal, rocket efficiency and reusability, and how he approaches education and learning.