This week, the puzzle from the weekend edition of Le Monde was easy to state: in the sequence (8+17n), is there a 6th power? a 7th? an 8th? If so, give the first occurrence. So I first wrote an R code for a function testing whether an integer is any ... [Read more...]

François Perron is visiting me for two months from Montréal and, following a discussion about the parallel implementation of MCMC algorithms—to which he also contributed with Yves Atchadé in 2005—, he remarked that a deterministic choice of permutations with the maximal contrast should do better than random or ... [Read more...]