rivalis

4 ms·

1.
by rivalis 11y ago
If you're talking about the linked post, I think the person who wrote it is Colin Wright, and he has a PhD from Cambridge in Combinatorics and Graph Theory. And anyway, at least they're talking about it... Is being ignored because
2.
by rivalis 11y ago
Not always. Sometimes "outsiders" just want some kind of insight as to why you do what you do all day; they're curious. A mathematician interested in engaging with the public has to try and identify which question is being as
3.
by rivalis 11y ago
Mathematical truths and objects are real things with existence independent of our minds that we "discover," not just designed things. The author seems to believe that the language used to describe mathematics (which is indeed a de
4.
by rivalis 13y ago
My advice is indeed geared towards general CS, it was unclear to me if the original poster wanted to get into heavy-duty theory or just gain a more rigorous understanding of CS in general. Even at good schools (in the US, anyway) the calc u
5.
by rivalis 13y ago
IamA graduate student in theoretical computer science. I don't know that I agree with the poster above with respect to: "a top school would require you to study a bunch of mathematics to gain a certain level of rigor of your think
6.
by rivalis 14y ago
I am a graduate student at a big state university, studying complexity theory. I TA for the (required) introduction to discrete mathematics sometimes, and when we study FSM's I get to have a lot of fun motivating them for the students. Auto
7.
by rivalis 14y ago
Nlp folks call those "stopwords," because they don't contribute much to statistical understanding of text. That is, in most nlp applications, those words are removed to leave more meaningful text behind. How did this make front page?
8.
by rivalis 15y ago
Random stuff. Really high-entropy, high-novelty stuff, as different from research papers and math/cs textbooks as I can manage (these make up the bulk of my reading material). Currently: - Portrait of a Lady - The Illiad - A collection of W
9.
by rivalis 15y ago
The first thing I do when someone tells me that they want to learn how to program is teach them how finite state automata work. If they seem to enjoy that, walk them through the NFA to regular expression proofs. Then we have a talk about th
10.
by rivalis 15y ago
On the one hand, this does not inspire confidence. It is disturbing to have magic in one's software. On the other hand, the speed gains are really impressive: I'm sure there are times when it is reasonable to make a magic vs. utility tradeo
11.
by rivalis 15y ago
Even when I'm working in a language that doesn't have first class functions, I find it easier to lay out my code by writing functional pseudocode and then "unrolling" maps into loops, closures into structs/objects, compositions into a seque
12.
by rivalis 15y ago
On the subject of evidence for "failing to educate": there is statistical evidence (with a decent sample size and population) that a large percentage of students (36-ish) do not show improvement on the CLA ( http://www.collegiatelearningass
13.
by rivalis 15y ago
You're conflating a few things here. This is certainly how higher education started, but in many places it has not remained that way. Some European democracies have made higher education radically affordable, such that citizens can learn to
14.
by rivalis 15y ago
This is dubious; the whole "higher education vs. entrepreneurship" discourse is a false dichotomy. What has happened is that capitalism has degraded most peoples' perceptions of the goals of higher education: they think it is meant to give