Back to Home11/15/2025, 4:49:49 PM

The Mighty Simplex (2023)

32 points
5 comments

Mood

thoughtful

Sentiment

positive

Category

science

Key topics

mathematics

optimization

algorithms

Debate intensity20/100

The article discusses the Simplex algorithm, a powerful method for solving linear programming problems, and its significance in various fields.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

30m

Peak period

1

Day 1

Avg / period

1

Comment distribution1 data points

Based on 1 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    11/15/2025, 4:49:49 PM

    3d ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    11/15/2025, 5:19:51 PM

    30m after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    1 comments in Day 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    11/15/2025, 5:19:51 PM

    3d ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (5 comments)
Showing 1 comments of 5
ceh123
3d ago
On the topic of simplices! I did my PhD in dynamical systems and the space of invariant measures [0] is (in the compact setting) always a simplex and the extreme points are the ergodic measures. It's because of this that you can kind of assume your system is ergodic do work there and frequently be able to generalize to the non-ergodic case (through ergodic decomposition).

But the real thing I wanted to mention here was the Poulsen Simplex [1]. This is the unique Choquet simplex [2] for which the extreme points are dense. This means that it's like an uncountably infinite dimensional triangle where no matter where you are inside the triangle, you're arbitrarily close to a corner. It's my favorite shape and absolutely wild and impossible to conceptualize (even though I worked with it daily for years!)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invariant_measure

[1] https://eudml.org/doc/74350

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choquet_theory

4 more comments available on Hacker News

ID: 45938698Type: storyLast synced: 11/16/2025, 9:42:57 PM

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