Viewing profile — markgall

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…

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 Mathem…

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.

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-insignifi…

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 =…

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"…

I didn't know most of this, but eagerly await my pre-order!

> 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 "decade…

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.

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…

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…

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 the…

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 rem…

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 Mak…

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 statem…

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 a…

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 n…

Oh, good idea! I read The Maniac but not that one, and the former should be on my list too.

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…

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-harr…

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…

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…

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.