Viewing profile — antiform

Why is this completely necessary? What would be an acceptable proof to you of this statement?

Sort of. The way I was taught, a progression is called arithmetic because each term is the arithmetic mean of its predecessor and successor, i.e. if A comes before a term X and B c…

I believe the paper the author is referring to is Franks, John. "Flow equivalences of subshifts of finite type." Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems (1984). 4:53-66. Cambridge Uni…

There are two biographies that I think should be required reading for wannabe Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: (1) High St@kes, No Prisoners by Charles H. Ferguson and (2) The New New…

In linear algebra, for a given linear transformation (a certain kind of matrix which generally represents some operation) M, an eigenvalue of M is a scalar c such that given a non-…

Write the idea down somewhere. However, ideas are a dime a dozen and are essentially useless unless you have a viable plan of attack. For instance, I would love to work on somethin…

To me, the article isn't saying to abandon the road to mastery, but merely to take some detours once in a while. Dedicating a lot of time and energy to something is definitely fulf…

In my experience, reading papers with math gets a lot faster as you get used to the conventions. It used to take me almost a whole day to digest a single math or CS paper in a fiel…

That certainly seems true, but how much of that is because by doing so you get to go to a school like Caltech, Harvard, or MIT? A more interesting question to me would be whether A…

From what my high school math teacher told me, it's because the modern U.S. curriculum was last drastically revamped in wartime to pump out future engineers and physicists, which i…

From the real number axioms: Let x \in R. Then we have that x*0 + x*0 = 0*x + 0*x = (0+0)*x = 0*x = x*0 by commutativity of multiplication, distributivity, the existence of a neutr…

Because the concentrated effort needed to "not do something" seems to increase the likeliness that you will do exactly that, especially under stress. For some reason, it seems that…

It also tends to work better than not telling anybody about it at all. If you tell people that you are quitting something, there is a social pressure on you to follow through on yo…

Some schools are fighting back against this. For example, I know that the UCLA math department has a policy that professors are required to search for a replacement textbook once a…

I'm glad I'm not the only person who has #3. For some reason, I seem to get miraculous insights into problems when I'm exercising, so I've taken to keeping a tiny pen and a couple …

"It's not a shortcoming, it's a feature!" While I am now an Apple fan, this reminds me of the ridiculous excuses Apple fanboys gave me when they compared their early-generation iPo…

Does anybody here know somebody that has used this program to aid their learning of computer science concepts? It's certainly an admirable cause, but is this a better introduction …

These are the times when I wish that this technology was open-source (correct me I'm wrong), so if it was lacking, it could be added. I would love to have some similar way of turni…

No way. There are tons of people in the sciences with very interesting lives, they just don't have people knocking down their door to write popular biographies like Feynman, Erdös,…

I believe this link was flagged and killed when posted before. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=523065 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544076 Does HN not remember flagged/ki…

The reason that short, frequent publishing is so pervasive on the web is that you have to compete with everything else on the internet that is shiny, flashing, and begging for your…

A good way for me to maintain motivation when slogging through information-dense nonfiction books (like textbooks, programming language manuals) is to read through actively (writin…