Donations for 2016
The following explains where I plan to donate in 2016, with some of my thinking
behind it. This year, I had \$10,000 to allocate (the sum of my giving from 2015
and
Thinking Outside One's Paradigm
When I meet someone who works in a field outside of computer science, I usually
ask them a lot of questions about their field that I'm curious about. (This is
still
Two Strange Facts
Here are two strange facts about matrices, which I can prove but not in a
satisfying way.
1. If $A$ and $B$ are symmetric matrices satisfying $0 \preceq A \preceq B$,
then $A^
Difficulty of Predicting the Maximum of Gaussians
Suppose that we have a random variable $X \in \mathbb{R}^d$, such that
$\mathbb{E}[XX^{\top}] = I_{d \times d}$. Now take k independent Gaussian random
variables $Z_1, \ldots, Z_
Maximal Maximum-Entropy Sets
Consider a probability distribution ${p(y)}$ on a space ${\mathcal{Y}}$. Suppose
we want to construct a set ${\mathcal{P}}$ of probability distributions on
${\mathcal{Y}}$ such that ${p(y)}$ is the maximum-entropy