drbaskin

8 ms·

31.
by drbaskin 16y ago
Strictly speaking, the Taylor series won't even do what you're wanting them to do for smooth functions. (Consider the function e^{-1/x^2}, whose Taylor series is zero at the origin. In fact, given any sequence of numbers, you can cook u
32.
by drbaskin 16y ago
It's also not really fair to include Hennessy on this list -- he is the president of Stanford, after all. That is a very different job from professor, and pays quite well. According to his wikipedia page, "As Stanford's president, Henness
33.
by drbaskin 16y ago
I'm partial to the University of Chicago, so you won't get any disagreement there. Evanston is new to me, but the campus of NU seems very pleasant -- I really like the piece of lakefront path that seems integrated into campus. Of course, t
34.
by drbaskin 16y ago
Which campus in Chicago are you referring to? I've enjoyed bumming around NU, UC, and UIC at least as much as I enjoyed bumming around Stanford. I know, NU is not technically in Chicago, but it is as close to the loop as Stanford is to SF
35.
by drbaskin 16y ago
I use emacs mostly for LaTeX editing, so most of my .emacs sets up macros to make it easy to insert greek letters with a keystroke. (For some reason, I really hate using LaTeX macros to write shortcuts for these.)
36.
by drbaskin 16y ago
I've heard that it's possible (not easy) for statistics Ph.D.s to jump directly to faculty positions, but I think this is becoming less common. I think that economics Ph.D.s also often jump directly to faculty positions.
37.
by drbaskin 16y ago
The same is true in math -- it is rare for mathematicians to move directly from a Ph.D. to a tenure-track faculty position.
38.
by drbaskin 16y ago
I've heard the following rule about writing (math -- other fields may be different): Take your best estimate, double it, and then increase the units. For example, two days becomes four weeks, one week becomes two months, etc.
39.
by drbaskin 16y ago
If you think of the figure as lying in the x-y plane, then its projection onto one of the axes has the same length no matter the orientation of the figure. One nifty example of this is the Reuleaux triangle, which is related to the mechani
40.
by drbaskin 16y ago
I find it hard to believe that the article on fractional differentiation only briefly mentions the Fourier transform. For functions on R^n with vanishing integral (or periodic functions on R^n with vanishing integral), the Fourier transfor
41.
by drbaskin 17y ago
I don't think that the wiki article you cite supports your claim -- it states that nand and nor are both functionally complete but does not (at the time of this writing) indicate why nand would be more likely.
42.
by drbaskin 17y ago
This is more of a curiosity than anything, but one can always use Michael Spivak's gender-neutral pronouns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun
43.
by drbaskin 17y ago
My favorite piece of numerical linear algebra is the pseudospectrum. In some sense, this is a set that gives you an indication of whether your eigenvalue computations will be accurate or not. Understanding non-normal operators really requ
44.
by drbaskin 17y ago
I'm not one to say that coloring grids of squares sounds fascinating to me, but nandemo's point still holds -- as far as mathematics goes, it's pretty concrete.
45.
by drbaskin 17y ago
Your response is a reasonable explanation of Hilbert's hotel paradox, but that paradox is really different from the Banach-Tarski paradox. In particular, the Banach-Tarski paradox is false in two dimensions. (One technical reason for th
46.
by drbaskin 17y ago
The reals and the integers do have different cardinalities, but not for the reason you imply. In fact, the rational numbers have the same cardinality (the same infinity) as the integers, but they have the same property that you use to char
47.
by drbaskin 17y ago
There are a number of ways to make this rigorous, at least for some narrow classes of operators. For many self-adjoint (or normal) operators, you can use the functional calculus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_calculus You can al