Articles

Fastlegebytter

(Norwegian) I denne artikkelen bruker vi matematikk for å få ned ventetidene for fastlegebytter, uten at det koster noe eller krever flere leger.


Monte Carlo modeling in Python with probabilit

The Python package probabilit uses a lazily evaluated graph to propagate samples from various distributions through mathematical expressions. The package also contains low-level functions for correlating random variables and finding the nearest correlation matrix.




People rating people

If people rate each other on a platform, such as on Tinder or an e-commerce website - how can we aggregate the individual ratings to produce an overall rating?




Fraværsgrensa

(Norwegian) Fraværsgrensa er på 10%, men noen fag har langt mindre timer enn andre. Da øker sannsynligheten for å komme over grensa betraktelig. I denne artikkelen regner vi ut sannsynligheten for at en VGS-elev mister karaktergrunnlaget.


How do Voting Advice Applications work?

The article explains the mathematics behind Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) and visualizes both parties and statements as vectors. Two new ideas are also presented. One is to explain a user’s political position as a convex combination of parties. The other is to present the user with statements in a sequence that guarantees the statements are not too similar.


Hvordan fungerer en valgomat?

(Norwegian) Denne artikkelen forklarer matematikken bak valgomater ved å visualisere partier og påstander som vektorer. To nye idéer blir også presentert. Den ene er å forklare en brukers politiske ståsted som en konveks kombinasjon av partier. Den andre er å presentere brukeren for påstander i en rekkefølge som garanterer at påstandene ikke blir for like.



Strømstøtte, fastpris, makspris og insentiver

(Norwegian) Ap vil bytte ut strømstøtte med fastpris, mens Frp og KrF vil ha makspris. Økonomer påpeker at insentiver forsvinner med fastpris. Vi kan fikse politikernes forslag ved hjelp av enkel matematikk på VGS-nivå: logaritmer og eksponentialfunksjoner.


Beer tasting

A beer tasting experiment provides a nice everyday application of statistical modeling and hypothesis testing.


Papers read in 2024

A list of papers read in 2024 as part of a paper reading club. The papers cover data science, recommendation engines, continuous optimization, operations research, information theory and statistics.



The average value

Presentation slides and video of a talk I gave about notions of averages (one-parameter models), loss functions and simple machine learning problems.


Smooth taxes without brackets

Implementing the Norwegian income tax is a pain. It requires keeping track of various deductions, if-then-else rules and around 20 constants. In this article we introduce a smooth tax function, simplifying the computation to a single formula with two constants.


Arithmetic coding in Python

We shrink Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” to its limit using arithmetic coding. This article showcases my Python implementation of the algorithm.


Turnusplaner for sykepleiere

(Norwegian) Dårlige vaktplaner kan være en kilde til frustrasjon, og gode vaktplaner har stor samfunnsøkonomisk gevinst. Matematisk optimering kan finne gode turnuser på noen få sekunder.


The reverse pseudo-Huber loss function

The Huber loss function behaves like squared loss for small values and like absolute loss for large values. In this article we reverse the pseudo-Huber, creating a smooth function that behaves like absolute loss for small values and like squared loss for large values.