Comments on: We dinna take no simian ticks, nossir

By: me

me — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:06:20 +0000

I stopped studying math during functional analysis II – when I realized that I had completely lost track of what anything in the course could conceivably be good for and made the mistake of asking the prof, who turned out to never have considered that question. Interestingly enough, he originally came from physics, so the posing the question was not as nonsensical as it might have seemed.

That said, I was reminded of that moment a few days ago, upon finding an article that heralded the clarity and straightforwardness of APL.

Here’s an implementation of the game of life in APL, thankfully with explanations. I still struggle with the idea of that string of symbols at the top being “readable”.

http://catpad.net/michael/apl/

By: Max

Max — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 07:40:27 +0000

“I’ll out a book: Du and Ko, Problem Solving in Automata, Languages, and Complexity”

That book is evil. I haven’t used it for coursework, but I did a research project on P, NP and NP-completeness, and at the start of it, my supervisor said, I can give you a book on the subject (and it was Du and Ko) but I recommend you go to the library and get one that you can actually read.

That said, once you know what’s going on, it’s a good reference, and I ended up citing it in my project.

By: EvanM

EvanM — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:03:18 +0000

My main problem with mathematical notation is that there isn’t (AFAIK) any easy way to look up the meaning of a symbol that you don’t know.

How much space would it take up in a book to at least map the weird symbols to their English pronunciations? Then, at least I could google them.

By: Omer

Omer — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:26:53 +0000

Thought I’d save time by starting some parts of my CS degree during the vacation year.
Java and the Basics of Computer Science was a blast, so I figured what the hey and took Calculus next.
That was a year ago and I’m still fighting the trauma, beginning with Algebra I this next period.
Real university starts in a year and I’m still pretty horrified by it all.

Nice to see I’m not the only one..

By: William Mayo

William Mayo — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:45:16 +0000

Oh my stars and garters yes.

As someone who’s trying to pull himself up by his bootstraps from a liberal arts degree to programming competance, I have to say… Oh my GOD I wish SICP and TAoCP didn’t require such strong familiarity with mathematical symbols to even begin to make use of them.

I’m inching my way through SICP, but sometimes I have to look at someone else’s solution just to understand the notation for the PROBLEM.

By: harborpirate

harborpirate — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:21:55 +0000

Glad to see there are others who quickly get lost in the crazy symbols of certain higher level math topics. I had a hell of a time with advanced calculus, for some reason I would look at the symbols, and they would stare back at me… were they shaking? Were they shaking with mocking laughter? Once an excessive number of greek symbols started entering a course, it started to literally become “all greek to me”. Everything took me an incredibly long time because I had to remember every time what function a given symbol stood for, then how to use it… then the next one.. and the next one… After finally parsing the symbols I had to look at the whole equation again to try to figure out what it was supposed to do. This was after looking at hundreds of them.

I think a large portion of the problem is that math notation is quite old, created by people who understood greek (either natively or through its study). So when they see lambdas and sigmas and all these other distorted horrible symbols with strange names running around, they weren’t frightened at all, because they had seen these many times before.

I was faced with “I define some concept you have never heard of as being represented by this symbol />|

By: Adamantyr

Adamantyr — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:35:00 +0000

Sounds like my Algorithm Analysis class in school… that textbook and the Romanian professor along with it was just strange. I halfway wondered if we should be sacrificing live chickens or chanting mantras at some point.

And yet, somehow in some weird way I was grasping the concepts, because I got an A- and a personal congratulations from the professor who said I “got it” better than most. Er, ok…

By: Ahnfelt

Ahnfelt — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:16:28 +0000

I don’t really know a lot about denotational semantics, but operational semantics serves a similar purpose. I recommend reading Benjamin C. Pierce: Types and Programming Languages. I think it requires only high school math, and it defines everything it uses, including sets, lambda calculus and operational semantics. The focus is on type checking (including advanced type reconstruction/inference). Probably the best CS book I have ever read.

By: Adrock

Adrock — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:42:04 +0000

I’ll out a book: Du and Ko, Problem Solving in Automata, Languages, and Complexity

Look, I’m cool with the material being hard to understand. But like Langdon, things would suddenly appear that the authors were clearly taking for granted that you just knew or what find elsewhere. Thats just BAD text book writing right there. We did the whole book in one semester even though the authors recommended it for two. In the review for the course, I told the professor that using that book made me question how thoroughly the school actually wanted us students to learn this material. Somehow, I managed a B+.

By: Peter De Wachter

Peter De Wachter — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:30:18 +0000

Yes, the R5RS denotational semantics are nice, but they come with an absolute minimum of explanation. I don’t think it will make sense to anyone who doesn’t already grok denotational semantics.

I liked Gordon’s “The denotational description of programming languages”. YMMV.