Top all-time · #2299
Nick Higham
Personal blog · nhigham.commathprogramming
Nick Higham's personal blog at nhigham.com covers math and programming. Since 2020, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 60 times, most often “What Is the Complex Step Approximation? (2020)”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nick Higham's blog for accessible explainers in numerical linear algebra, especially the "What is..." series, plus notes on algorithms, correlation matrices and floating-point arithmetic.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called the "What is..." series "wonderful and accessible"; "a one-man Wikipedia of linear algebra"; a "helpful" write-up; "a good blog".
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A wordpress blog about applied mathematics, covering research, writing, software and workflow and featuring Emacs, LaTeX, MATLAB and SIAM.
Most-linked posts?
- What Is the Complex Step Approximation? (2020)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-04-08
- Nick Higham: 'What Is?' Series3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-19
- What Is a Hessenberg Matrix?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-05
- What Is Gershgorin’s Theorem?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-22
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-30
- The Power of Bidiagonal Matrices2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-11-22
- What Is Stochastic Rounding?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-20
What Hacker News says?
Also, please check other posts in Professor Nick Higham's blog. Especially his wonderful and accessible "What is ..." series of articles [0] [0] https://nhigham.com/index-of-what-is-articles/
Comment linking /index-of-what-is-articles/
on “Seven sins of numerical linear algebra”Submitted Seven sins of numerical linear algebra as a story · 333 points
HN discussionProf Higham has quite the list of papers on the finer points of numerical algorithms going back to his MSc in 1983: http://www.ma.man.ac.uk/~higham/papers/bibbase.php including a brief note on the comparing "Top 10 Algorithms in Applied Mathematics" between 2000 and 2016 that may interest some: https://nhigham.com/2016/03/29/the-top-10-algorithms-in-appl... It'd be nice to see some meat on the bones and a few rippin…
Comment linking /2016/03/29/the-top-10-algorithms-in-applied-mathematics/
on “Seven sins of numerical linear algebra”Submitted The big six matrix factorizations as a story · 268 points
HN discussionAs it turns out, the author does cover the rank-decomposition (under the name "Rank-Revealing Factorization") in his blog as well: https://nhigham.com/2021/05/19/what-is-a-rank-revealing-fact...
Comment linking /2021/05/19/what-is-a-rank-revealing-factorization/
on “The big six matrix factorizations”Submitted What is an eigenvalue? as a story · 262 points
HN discussionThe thing about Higham is that he's sort of a one-man Wikipedia of linear algebra. Many of the terms that he uses also have their own pages that (eventually) break the concepts down into comprehensible terms. See https://nhigham.com/index-of-what-is-articles/ for a useful listing. Or, in an alternative form, https://github.com/higham/what-is . Notice that if you go all the way back up the rabbit hole you'll find use…
Comment linking /index-of-what-is-articles/
on “What is an eigenvalue?”Submitted The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics as a story · 215 points
HN discussionIn my case, I am applying this in the calibration of instantaneous correlation matrices. His relevant papers can be found at [0]. It was really helpful that he also published MATLAB code of most of his algorithms. [0] https://nhigham.com/correlation-matrices/
Comment linking /correlation-matrices/
on “The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics”Submitted Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017) as a story · 132 points
HN discussionThanks for mentioning that. It's a problem I occasionally need to solve and based on your comment, I found this helpful write up by Nick Higham [1]. [1] https://nhigham.com/2021/01/26/what-is-the-nearest-positive-...
Comment linking /2021/01/26/what-is-the-nearest-positive-semidefinite-matrix/
on “The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics”Submitted Can We Solve Linear Algebra Problems at Extreme Scale and Low Precisions? as a story · 95 points
HN discussionA method which this article doesn't mention is stochastic rounding or probabilistic rounding. Rather than striving for exact values for every computation, we make it so that the expected value is exact. For example, suppose our number system was restricted to the integers and we have incoming value 1.1, with stochastic rounding we'd round down to 1 90% of the time and 2 10% of the time giving an expected value of 1.…
Comment linking /2020/07/07/what-is-stochastic-rounding/
on “Taming floating-point sums”Submitted What Is a Schur Decomposition? (2022) as a story · 90 points
HN discussionWow, apparently published his last post, "What Is the Spectral Radius of a Matrix?" just 8 days before his passing. Legend. https://nhigham.com/2024/01/
Comment linking /2024/01/
on “What Is a Schur Decomposition? (2022)”Submitted What Is the Complex Step Approximation? (2020) as a story · 10 points
HN discussionhttps://nhigham.com/2020/10/06/what-is-the-complex-step-appr...
Comment linking /2020/10/06/what-is-the-complex-step-approximation/
on “Automatic Differentiation in OCaml”Submitted Writing Mathematics in Pencil, and Why Analogue Is Not Dead (2017) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://nhigham.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Higham
Comment linking /
on “RIP Nick Higham”Submitted The Rise of Mixed Precision Arithmetic (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHigham, who contributed code to the NAG library and Matlab, had a good blog on applied mathematics, numerical linear algebra, and software at https://nhigham.com/blog/ .
Comment linking /blog/
on “RIP Nick Higham”Submitted The Power of Bidiagonal Matrices as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTerrence Tao https://terrytao.wordpress.com/ Nick Higham https://nhigham.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Interesting mathematics blogs?”Submitted What Is Gershgorin’s Theorem? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis might help: https://nhigham.com/2020/06/09/what-is-a-matrix-function/
Comment linking /2020/06/09/what-is-a-matrix-function/
on “The Power of Bidiagonal Matrices”Submitted What Is a Nilpotent Matrix? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFWIW there is an ISO Standard: > ISO 80000-2:2009 > Quantities and units — Part 2: Mathematical signs and symbols to be used in the natural sciences and technology https://nhigham.com/2016/01/28/typesetting-mathematics-accor...
Comment linking /2016/01/28/typesetting-mathematics-according-to-the-iso-standard/
on “The Art of LaTeX: Advice for Typesetting Beautiful, Delightful Proofs”Submitted Cleve Moler Wins Iciam Industry Prize 2023 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionInspired by a great blog post by Nick Higham https://nhigham.com/2018/12/03/half-precision-arithmetic-fp1...
Comment linking /2018/12/03/half-precision-arithmetic-fp16-versus-bfloat16/
on “Converging Harmonic Series with bfloat16”Submitted What Is Fast Matrix Multiplication? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
