markgall

7 ms·

1.
by markgall 8d ago
I assume the rumor is a counterexample? Where do I go to get wind of these rumors?
2.
by markgall 1mo ago
I've taught out of the first three of these. If I had to pick one for a first study, I'd vote for Strang -- and watch his videos while you go. Our second-semester mostly-math-majors linear algebra course uses Axler, which I thin
3.
by markgall 3mo ago
Is this really a big debate? I am in the similarly-named (but apparently distant) field of algebraic geometry and have never even heard of geometric algebra. Certainly I know about Clifford and exterior algebras, but this debate has never
4.
by markgall 3mo ago
Probably the most general-purpose one is SageMath, which is open-source and basically Python with a ton of sophisticated math stuff built into it. Everything I used to do in Mathematica I now do in sage, and I don't think I'm the
5.
by markgall 3mo ago
Still nowadays? My impression is that in (pure) math it's lost most of its market share in the last few years. But maybe that's only in my circles.
6.
by markgall 4mo ago
As others have said, very common. A famous example is Lyrica, which made an enormous amount of money for Northwestern, probably around $1 billion dollars. It played a not-insignificant role in the university's rise in the last 10-20
7.
by markgall 5mo ago
I only skimmed the article, but I think the idea is to use some variation on: f(a,b,c,d,e) = the largest real solution x of the quintic equation x^5 + ax^4 + bx^3 + cx^2 + dx + e = 0 There's not a simple formula for this function (whic
8.
by markgall 5mo ago
Can anyone provide a link that "Some are going as far as to suggest that the entire foundations of computer engineering and machine learning should be re-built as a result of this", or anything similarly grandiose? I am a professi
9.
by markgall 6mo ago
I didn't know most of this, but eagerly await my pre-order!
10.
by markgall 7mo ago
> Polynomial growth (t^n) never reaches infinity at finite time. You could wait until heat death and t^47 would still be finite. Polynomials are for people who think AGI is "decades away." > Exponential growth reaches infini
11.
by markgall 7mo ago
What? I am living in one of these places right now. The rate of road deaths is vastly higher than even in the USA. This is not a good model.
12.
by markgall 8mo ago
Is this really true? I played a few games with it in August. It's not very good. It's one of those old programs where 95% of the moves are pretty strong. But if you just do nothing and sit back it will occasionally make a rando
13.
by markgall 10mo ago
I still have my old PowerBook G4 from 2005, with some not-that-old Debian currently installed. Every time my main laptop goes out commission, I get the G4 back out and use it for a few days. It's good enough for most of my work, thou
14.
by markgall 1y ago
Does there exist a person who would make this argument straight-faced? I am a professional mathematician and have yet to hear of anyone coaxing an even slightly interesting new theorem out of AI. I think the day is clearly coming but it&#
15.
by markgall 2y ago
Yeah, I have been teaching calculus for ... several years, and it's very clear that the curriculum has been dumbed down over the years across the board. The last place I was at removed infinite series from the curriculum altogether.
16.
by markgall 2y ago
I agree with the first two of these, they are great. (And I bet the third is too, I've just never needed it.) If I had to submit one tip it would be to set everything up with a Makefile or similar. I keep my transactions spread acros
17.
by markgall 2y ago
There is ledger-mode and beancount-mode which are both nice (depending on which program you use). I would say the majority of what I do in practice Python scripts to convert statements to ledger; the amount of stuff I do by hand is minimal
18.
by markgall 2y ago
I've found that so few of my accounts support ofxget that it's not worth the trouble of dealing with it. I just occasionally download year-to-date statements from all my accounts and then run scripts to convert them to ledger for
19.
by markgall 2y ago
I'm an academic and try pretty hard to take the train. Just got back from a 19-hours-each way Greyhound+train+Greyhound ordeal to give a couple talks. My destination was only two not-that-big states away. They don't make it easy
20.
by markgall 2y ago
Oh, good idea! I read The Maniac but not that one, and the former should be on my list too.
21.
by markgall 2y ago
I'm not aware of any, but maybe somebody else is. A more general question is are there any other DFW-ish math-ish writings to be found? Against The Day (Pynchon) is not really math-ish, but it does have a good bit of math (more than
22.
by markgall 2y ago
This should be read in parallel with the review by Michael Harris in the AMS Notices: "A Sometimes Funny Book Supposedly about Infinity" https://www.ams.org/notices/200406/rev-harris.pdf As a DFW lover w
23.
by markgall 2y ago
I think if you look at a new algebra paper in a good journal, it's as likely to be interesting as a random algebra paper in a good journal from 1980. (Of course neither is anywhere near 100%, there were many boring papers back then to
24.
by markgall 2y ago
I think this note also misses that there are idiosyncratic factors related to the Journal of Algebra. This used to be a quite good generalist journal focused on algebra -- the Tits Alternative appeared there in the 70s, for example. Elsev
25.
by markgall 2y ago
Another important one! I think they pump a lot of money into the MoMath as well. It's just hard to come up with every way the math world depends on Simons money.
26.
by markgall 2y ago
Good point! Far and away the best popularization of recent results, at least in the eyes of a mathematician.
27.
by markgall 2y ago
Will be interesting to see how this affects math research. He has pumped unthinkable amounts of money into the field. The only first-class flights I've taken in my life were to get to Simons-funded conferences at super fancy hotels.
28.
by markgall 3y ago
They are all run by some company "Mamava" who uses the app as a key. Why it's necessary I couldn't say.
29.
by markgall 3y ago
I've never had a smartphone and I think the extent to which you need a smartphone is nowadays is overstated. The only things I have ever encountered that I simply could not use was the bikeshare in town and the mothers' nursing s
30.
by markgall 3y ago
I never used Windows in my life, but I got an old ThinkPad on eBay a couple months ago that shipped with Windows 11. I didn't have time to set up Linux, so I used it a bit to browse and so on for about a month before I finally got aro

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