svat

51 ms·

541.
by svat 4y ago
Tom Lehrer once said: "It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."
542.
by svat 4y ago
I can't imagine any application. :-) The fascination is more that of explanation: if you treat T = 1 + T^2 as an algebraic equation in the complex numbers, you can get a lot of expressions that are meaningless: it's hard to make s
543.
by svat 4y ago
A very nice fact that I coincidentally learned just yesterday, which is not in the linked answer but is touched on in one of the comments and in an edit on the accepted answer: there is an explicit bijection that maps a binary tree to seven
544.
by svat 4y ago
For programmers today, an option to consider is to use plain TeX directly, by writing in Markdown or whatever, and generating the `.tex` file via a preprocessor program. After all, the facilities that LaTeX was written to provide (automat
545.
by svat 4y ago
Tom Lehrer wrote a song called "I'm Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LslsgH3-UFU ) — I had assumed it was just a joke for the rhyme, but looking at this conversation I'm
546.
by svat 4y ago
On the other hand, there are many reports that Leonardo himself lamented not finishing things, and wrote “Tell me if anything was ever done” in his notebooks. (I don't know the full context of this—searching online suggests the origina
547.
by svat 4y ago
Knuth wrote that preface in the early 1960s, when it was indeed true that much of what little there was of published mathematical study related to programming was faulty. He succeeded incredibly well: he kickstarted the entire field of &quo
548.
by svat 4y ago
You can get a bit of an idea by reading Knuth's "The IBM 650: An Appreciation from the Field", written in 1986 and nostalgically looking back at the 1956–60 period when he entered college and first encountered a computer (the
549.
by svat 4y ago
Concrete Mathematics is not a prerequisite, but an expanded version of the "Mathematical Preliminaries" section of TAOCP. (More precisely, Knuth and later Graham used to teach a course at Stanford based on that section of TAOCP;
550.
by svat 4y ago
Re "being paid", consider that he took early retirement in 1992 to work on this book that he sees as his life's work ( https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html ) (and until then was doing in his "side
551.
by svat 4y ago
Writing style is subjective and I find Knuth's delightful: almost every paper of his that I've read has been fun. Even in his technical papers he writes at the level an undergraduate student with decent mathematical background (or
552.
by svat 4y ago
Note that, to get an idea of the contents, you can see the previously published fascicles, and earlier drafts online (pre-fascicles): • Mathematical Preliminaries Redux: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc5a.ps.gz • 7.
553.
by svat 4y ago
The earliest Wayback Machine archive of that link is from August 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20000824013718/http://research.m... Looks like in December 2008 (between https://web.archive.
554.
by svat 4y ago
(2002), or maybe (2001) or (2000) or (1999): The Wayback Machine's earliest archive of this page is from June 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020603071812/https://norvig.co... and the page itsel
555.
by svat 4y ago
Similar thought from Albert Einstein (1930): > ”Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the ma
556.
by svat 4y ago
As always, ignore the headline: This article is a very good look at how Wikipedia works in practice; I'm (pleasantly) surprised to see such detailed and factual reporting about Wikipedia in the media.
557.
by svat 4y ago
> encode a grapheme cluster as a constant size […] totally possible with damn near every language that people actually use This is not true. For a concrete example: the languages Hindi and Marathi, with ~500 million speakers, use the D
558.
by svat 4y ago
Or maybe it's not that there's deep truth to the content , and instead the form is what brings joy and intrigue. :)
559.
by svat 4y ago
> The book is more an act of self-indulgence on the author's part That's precisely what it is. And what makes it valuable too: such works of blatant self-indulgence are not very common in mathematics (at least, while remainin
560.
by svat 4y ago
IMO, to read GEB for its content would be missing the point: what I think is the greatest thing about the book is that it's simply, purely, Hofstadter having fun . The linked post says "GEB is really idiosyncratic in a way no o
561.
by svat 4y ago
For reference, here is the corresponding table of all 16 functions, from Knuth: https://imgur.com/a/Xb2HysB (TAOCP Vol 4A, earlier draft of this part online at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc0b
562.
by svat 4y ago
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gs... — earliest internet mention (AFAIK), citing Carlin Vieri who coined the term (with this meaning). https://seths.blog/2005/0
563.
by svat 4y ago
It may be illustrative to discuss a concrete example from text layout: consider deciding whether to break before or after a certain word on a line. • Suppose the width of each line is L, and the inter-word space is "S plus P minus M&qu
564.
by svat 4y ago
Better articles (IMO) at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_base_of_numeration Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio_base https://en.wikipedia.org/w
565.
by svat 4y ago
As someone who grew up with the intricate pantheons and mythology (and is continuing to learn and pass them on), I am familiar with them. :-) The distinction I'm making is not about whether belief is an aspect or not (it is), but about
566.
by svat 4y ago
While its main point is interesting to think about, this article still has a view of "religion" that is (despite token mentions of Buddhism and, via perennial philosophy, Hinduism) very influenced by Abrahamic (monotheistic) conce
567.
by svat 4y ago
TeX Live allows a minimal installation, but what MikTeX has that TeX Live doesn't (AFAIK) is the on-demand automatic fetching and installing of packages. For example, if you `\usepackage{foo}` then with a minimal TeX Live you have to
568.
by svat 4y ago
I agree with your main point about the binaries being small and a reasonable LaTeX distribution fitting in under 50 MiB (I think starting with a minimal MiKTeX and letting it install what you need a few times will leave you there as well),
569.
by svat 4y ago
> No other English poet wrote successfully in so many structural forms, or summoned so many of the language’s ancestral voices […] claiming as personal playground the entirety of English versification. An interesting example, not menti
570.
by svat 4y ago
The name "double-entry bookkeeping" may be misleading: what matters is not how many times / in how many places you do entry , but whether you're tracking both (or all) sides of a transaction. (With a computer you only

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