How Mathematica Draws a Dragonfly

Mathematica includes code to draw various whimsical images. For example, if you enter the following command in Mathematica Entity["PopularCurve", "DragonflyCurve"][ EntityProperty["PopularCurve", "Image"]] you get an image of a dragonfly. It draws such images with Fourier series. You can tell by asking for the parameterization of the curve. If you enter

How often to the hands of a clock line up?

How often do the hour and and minute hand of an analog clock point in the same direction? The hands start pointing the same direction at midnight, then the hour hand moves clockwise (!) by 360° in 12 hours. The minute hand moves clockwise at the rate of 360° in

The Quick Guide to Dijkstra’s Algorithm

The bad version of a good test

Ever since 1952, the largest known primes have all had the form 2n − 1, with one exception in 1989. The reason the largest known primes have this form is that it is easier to test whether these numbers are prime than other numbers. A number of the form 2n

URx 2025 recap: Reimagining early career recruiting in the age of AI

Each year, the URx Conference brings together professionals from across university recruiting, early talent programs, and college career services to share insights, strategies, and innovations for building the workforce of tomorrow. URx 2025 continued that tradition with an agenda centered around AI, experiential learning, inclusive hiring, and scalable talent development.

Strengthening integrations, reliability, and trust: New features for Stack Overflow for Teams

The 2025.4 Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise (SOE) release is all about helping teams work more seamlessly across tools, departments, and knowledge silos.

“The future is agents”: Building a platform for RAG agents

Douwe Kiela, CEO and cofounder of Contextual AI, joins Ryan and Ben to explore the intricacies of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). They discuss its origins, the evolution of AI models, the challenges of hallucinations, and the importance of system design. Douwe emphasizes the need for personalization in ranking systems and the

Chris’ Corner: Doing a Good Job

This is a great story from Dan North about “The Worst Programmer I know”, Tim MacKinnon. It’s a story about measuring developer performance with metrics: We were working for a well-known software consultancy at a Big Bank that decided to introduce individual performance metrics, “for appraisal and personal development purposes”.

WBIT #8: Typescript for gut biomes

Kyle is joined by his former colleague Tyler McEntee, now a senior software engineer at Jona, to talk about doing everything all at once at a startup.

Representing octonions as matrices, sorta

It’s possible to represent complex numbers as a pair of real numbers or 2 × 2 matrices with real entries. And it’s possible to represent quaternions as pairs of complex numbers or 2 × 2 matrices with complex entries were z* is the complex conjugate of z. And it’s also possible to