Viewing profile — rivalis

If you're talking about the linked post, I think the person who wrote it is Colin Wright, and he has a PhD from Cambridge in Combinatorics and Graph Theory. And anyway, at least th…

Not always. Sometimes "outsiders" just want some kind of insight as to why you do what you do all day; they're curious. A mathematician interested in engaging with the public has t…

Mathematical truths and objects are real things with existence independent of our minds that we "discover," not just designed things. The author seems to believe that the language …

My advice is indeed geared towards general CS, it was unclear to me if the original poster wanted to get into heavy-duty theory or just gain a more rigorous understanding of CS in …

IamA graduate student in theoretical computer science. I don't know that I agree with the poster above with respect to: "a top school would require you to study a bunch of mathemat…

I am a graduate student at a big state university, studying complexity theory. I TA for the (required) introduction to discrete mathematics sometimes, and when we study FSM's I get…

Nlp folks call those "stopwords," because they don't contribute much to statistical understanding of text. That is, in most nlp applications, those words are removed to leave more …

Random stuff. Really high-entropy, high-novelty stuff, as different from research papers and math/cs textbooks as I can manage (these make up the bulk of my reading material). Curr…

The first thing I do when someone tells me that they want to learn how to program is teach them how finite state automata work. If they seem to enjoy that, walk them through the NF…

On the one hand, this does not inspire confidence. It is disturbing to have magic in one's software. On the other hand, the speed gains are really impressive: I'm sure there are ti…

Even when I'm working in a language that doesn't have first class functions, I find it easier to lay out my code by writing functional pseudocode and then "unrolling" maps into loo…

On the subject of evidence for "failing to educate": there is statistical evidence (with a decent sample size and population) that a large percentage of students (36-ish) do not sh…

You're conflating a few things here. This is certainly how higher education started, but in many places it has not remained that way. Some European democracies have made higher edu…

This is dubious; the whole "higher education vs. entrepreneurship" discourse is a false dichotomy. What has happened is that capitalism has degraded most peoples' perceptions of th…