Viewing profile — tychonoff

I'm a 73-year-old Canadian programmer with no formal education in computing. After completing a PhD in pure Mathematics, I started working the next day writing scheduling algorithm…

I remember studying this book 40+ years ago. It was a joy to read.

Interview programmers like you would a carpenter: 1) Describe some projects you've worked on, and your role in them 2) Describe some of your favourite projects, or accomplishments …

Mathematics isn't just another toolbox - it also represents an attitude. Well-structured code, modularization, and generality are natural by-products of theorem proving. So interes…

Nice work. But on page 43 "quadratic" is misspelled.

Why was Rosalind Franklin not awarded the Nobel Prize?

Presumably you mean Justin. His father, Pierre, was supremely confident and for good reason. He was in a class by himself as an intellectual and politician.

I did a PhD in pure mathematics decades ago, simply because it was so interesting. None of it seemed practical at the time (eg. category theory, topology, Horn logic) but that chan…

I obtained a PhD in pure math 30 years ago, and promptly went into computing with no programming skills. Mathematics allowed me to see things in a more general light, appreciate th…

Abraham Robinson's Non-standard analysis ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_analysis ) used a modern axiomatic approach to legitimize Isaac Newton's intuitive use of infin…

Thanks for the Chaitin lecture - he's a brilliant guy and outstanding speaker. His reference to Liebnitz reminds me of a beautiful quotation of his that goes something like: "Altho…

The author shunned mathematics in favor of programming, but this exercise showed why that was a mistake. Compared to serious mathematics, programming is relatively trivial. With ma…

The fact that everybody Googles what others have already done, instead of reading a manual (which no longer exists anyway) says it all. Suppose your car mechanic did that?

Nice.

I'm cleaning up someone else's code that didn't contain a single comment. When finished, the cost for doing this will exceed the original project (we're talking man-months here). A…