Here at Knewton we decided to purchase Mega Millions lottery tickets collectively. Here are some musings from our data science team on our chances of hitting it big.   The upcoming Mega Millions jackpot is around $540 million per $1 ticket, or a payoff of 540 million to one. The odds of winning are (according to the lottery web site) about 1 in 176 million. Neglecting the chances that the jackpot will split, this appears… Read more

Because I’m a physicist by training, I sometimes get asked what I’m doing at a tech company. After all, I spent a huge chunk of my life learning how to be a physicist. Why aren’t I smashing atoms, or making cold things levitate, or finding new things to do with lasers? First, my training isn’t completely orthogonal to what I do now. As a physicist, I was trained to program. Physicists often run into situations where we need to… Read more

A few of the men and women here at Knewton have had the pleasure of seeing me shirtless, and noticed my very nerdy tattoo. A few of them have asked me to explain it, so here goes: This equation is the Schrödinger Equation. The link to the Wikipedia page is here. If you’re interested, I suggest you check it out. It’s a little mathy, but it also has some great animations, and does a better job of… Read more

One exciting thing about working at Knewton here in NYC is that, while history is being made inside the office, history is also playing out on the streets just outside. Here are some pictures taken by Jess Nepom (Academic Project Manager here at Knewton) of the Occupy Wall Street camp in Union Square on Wednesday morning this week. The night before, while most of us were at home sleeping (excepting perhaps one or two people… Read more