In January, 1923, Lee Strasberg went to Al Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre to see “Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich,” a nineteenth-century Russian play about sixteenth-century Russian politics, performed, in ...

The blockbuster game Minecraft depicts a world created by cubes: everything is made of discrete building blocks. It may therefore seem particularly unsuitable for calculating pi (π), the mathematical ...

Standard computer implementations of Dantzig's simplex method for linear programming are based upon forming the inverse of the basic matrix and updating the inverse ...

Estimate your tax refund or bill using our free income tax calculator. Enter your income, age and filing status to get started. First, you'll want to download or gather any tax forms you've received ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. This pocket-sized sheet metal ...

Abstract: The Nelder-Mead simplex method is a well-known algorithm enabling the minimization of functions that are not available in closed-form and that need not be differentiable or convex.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at UC Berkeley, George Dantzig—a first-year graduate student—copied two problems ...

Herpes simplex is a viral infection that typically affects the mouth, genitals, or anal area. It is contagious and can cause outbreaks of sores and other symptoms. Herpes simplex virus (HSV) is a ...

With most of Washington shut down, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recalled employees to ensure that one statistic was released on time: the consumer price index. The Social Security Administration ...

A puzzle in theoretical chemistry has been solved at TU Wien: A new computational method now makes it possible to calculate the forces between large molecules with unprecedented accuracy. Why can ...

Lindsey Ellefson is Lifehacker’s Features Editor. She currently covers study and productivity hacks, as well as household and digital decluttering, and oversees the freelancers on the sex and ...