Patterns found by analysing ranking data from Wikipedia A fun part of any sport is comparing the top players and trying to determine who really was the best of the best. As a fan of squash, I thought I would do this for squash. As a data scientist, I tried…

Since 2014, Tom Whitwell has been producing a list of 52 things they learnt each year, e.g., 52 things they learnt in 2020. I enjoy reading these, and thought that maybe I should have a go at writing my own. So lets jump right in! With the right tools and…

Illustrating the fact L1 regularisation forces parameters to zero. — Introduction You will often read that a big difference between L1 and L2 regularisation is that L1 regularisation forces parameters to zero, whereas L2 regularisation does not. Michael Nielsen explains this via their effect on the update equations in gradient descent: In both expressions the effect of regularization is to shrink…

This is the 3rd lecture of the year, which was followed by an hour’s gap and then a workshop. The lecture was about subtraction. Many students, but not all of them, were going through lecture questions quite quickly, and then doing workshop questions too. One noteworthy thing was showing how…

Some thoughts on how teaching went. But first a summary of how lecture is organised. Summary of how I organise lectures Printed notes are provided with gaps throughout. I use a “document camera” or “visualiser”, not a slideshow. Lectures always start with warm-up questions. Throughout the lecture I pose questions to the students and give them…

I listened to episode two of this podcast: https://www.benbenandblue.com I would like to share my thoughts. I apologise in advance if I appear over-confident in my views — I welcome disagreement and am open to being corrected! How I intend to use lectures next academic year. I teach maths to…