All you need is some basic high school mathematics — This question is both simple and very challenging. It appeared on a Cambridge University Mathematics entrance paper in 1987. To answer it, you only need to to know some basic high school trigonometry. Here is the question: I’m going to proceed to give you my solution to this question, but…

I was surprised to see an R question pop up on a Cambridge Math Tripos Part II Paper last year — The Cambridge undergraduate Mathematics Tripos is among the toughest mathematics courses in the world. Unlike many other degree programmes, which offer modular examinations on different specialized topics, the Cambridge Tripos is examined annually using four 3-hour papers containing a choice of questions on an extremely wide array of subjects. …

This problem at first glance looks hard, but with the right method it is remarkably easy to solve — One of the most satisfying types of math problems to take on are those which look very hard on first sight, but turn out to be fairly easily solvable as long as you know the right method to apply. Here is such a problem. Take a quick look and then…

This mid-80s masterpiece still traumatizes every one of its viewers because its events are suddenly much more likely — As an eleven-year-old child, I have an enduring memory of a series of films broadcast by the BBC in the UK in August 1985 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Part of this series was the first British TV screening of The War…

Designed to test the most able 18 year olds, this question is interesting and a little annoying — Cambridge has set its Sixth Term Examination Papers (STEP) for over 30 years to test the most able Mathematics students in order to assess them for entry into various related undergraduate programs such as Mathematics and Computer Science. The papers test the student’s depth of knowledge and understanding of the…

In a few short lines of code, we’ll get any Billboard chart for any date in history — I used to think web scraping sounded complicated. You’d have to decode a bunch of HTML and Javascript and do messy hacking to get at what you wanted. But once I took a crack at it using my favourite language of R, I realized that tools exist to make it…

A great little learning exercise that illustrates the range and flexibility of the R language — In my earlier days of learning to code, I decided that I’d like to try to create Hans Rosling’s Gapminder bubble chart — made famous by his hugely entertaining lectures and TED talks — from scratch in R. I had a few criteria in mind as I proceeded: Can I…

All the indications are that we are heading for a prolonged economic contraction, but what does it mean for Data Scientists and Engineers? — The coming economic downturn will be the first of the Data Science era. …

With Quarto, your Jupyter notebooks can now be easily published into various professional formats — As someone who generates work in both R and Python, I’ve always wished that there was a nicer solution for turning my Jupyter notebooks into professional looking documents. …