Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#41

Post by menloparkbum » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 7:52 PM UTC

bluishgreen wrote: post #39

chrisduesing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really interesting advice. I have spent a lot of time lately considering how I could become more effective at teaching myself math. The community aspect is fundamental to my success as a programmer, but that is something that I have not come across for math. Where would you suggest someone find peers and or mentors?

If you are a good programmer its very easy to become friends with math/phys/cs profs. They typically have many projects that they are not looking at at the moment for lack of programming power. Offer a few hours a week of your time to a particular project that you feel interested in. You will learn crazy lots. This is what a "Grad Student" is. But IMO this is much better than being a grad student and suffocating thro…

This is how I got started programming professionally. During my freshman year, my CS prof had funding for a climate research project and he first set me up as a UNIX admin then a C and Perl programmer. In addition to learning UNIX and programming, it paid about 3 times as much as any other work study job, and I got to put "participated in NSF funded research" on my resume. I wasn't even a good programmer, I just wasn't as bad as everyone else.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#42

Post by nailer » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 8:06 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #13

stcredzero wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this same inventory control problem with cookbooks. I solved it by making a rule for myself: No new cookbooks until I cook 30% of the recipes in all the ones I already have. I have this same inventory control problem with computer science books. Good textbooks are expensive. If you implement a utilization rule like this, you can save yourself a lot of money on books you never end up reading. B&N, Borders and th…

Buy older editions of textbooks and also the "Eastern Economy" (read: china/india printed on cheap paper) editions. You will save a pretty penny, and thermodynamics hasn't changed much since 1975. (Obviously this won't work for machine learning.)

That's what you think.

asks perpetual motion powered hovering maid to replicate another iced tea

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#43

Post by scscsc » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 8:35 PM UTC

aheilbut wrote: post #34

bluishgreen wrote: post #21

The problem with math books. Succinctness. There you have it. This is the single most annoying problem with succinctness. When you go over a line of text sometimes it is justified to spend 3 hours with it. But sometimes its not, its just something that you are not seeing. The thing with math books is you cant tell if it needs 3 hours or 2 minutes because all the lines look the same and the succinct ones kinda jump at…

I'm surprised that nobody has made online math books where you can click on a succinct line of clever math and expand it, in place, to the two-page explanation.

Are you? Care to explain why you are suprized ?

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#44

Post by bluishgreen » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 8:49 PM UTC

chrisduesing wrote: post #40

bluishgreen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a good programmer its very easy to become friends with math/phys/cs profs. They typically have many projects that they are not looking at at the moment for lack of programming power. Offer a few hours a week of your time to a particular project that you feel interested in. You will learn crazy lots. This is what a "Grad Student" is. But IMO this is much better than being a grad student and suffocating thro…

Are you suggesting trading programming time for mentoring time, or just programming a math teacher's projects as a means to learn? How would you initiate something like that anyway? I would feel more than a little awkward wandering on to a local campus and knocking on doors in the math dept. Are there any online resources/communities?

First Question: Both.

Second Question: Read online about the interests of a prof. Select a few. Watch a few of their introductory lectures to see if you like how they explain stuff. Select one. Look up the office hours. Wander into the room and state your mind.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#45

Post by fizx » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 9:35 PM UTC

scscsc wrote: post #43

aheilbut wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that nobody has made online math books where you can click on a succinct line of clever math and expand it, in place, to the two-page explanation.

Are you? Care to explain why you are suprized ?

I think its because the web is a such a big and diverse place, that he assumes any idea that sounds good and is describable in one sentence is already implemented.

It's kind of like Rule 34, but not just for porn.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#46

Post by aheilbut » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 9:41 PM UTC

scscsc wrote: post #43

aheilbut wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that nobody has made online math books where you can click on a succinct line of clever math and expand it, in place, to the two-page explanation.

Are you? Care to explain why you are suprized ?

Well, I think such a book would be useful, and strikes me as a pretty obvious idea, with plenty of analogies in related areas (ie. zoomable user interfaces; code folding).

Currently, if you are reading math and hit something you don't understand, you can refer to other references (which may not use the same notation or approach things in quite the same way), and/or try to work out the details yourself, or get help from someone else. Working through yourself and looking at other sources certainly helps one learn, but can be very inefficient, and there can be a high energy barrier to success.

A 'zoomable' math text would require a lot of work to create, but the writing could be done collaboratively (or even partly automatically). There is some software to be written to implement this idea, but given the large number of computer and other scientists who depend on learning and using math, it is surprising to me that there hasn't been more experimentation with different ways to present it.

I guess I should try to write it...

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#47

Post by menloparkbum » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 9:45 PM UTC

I used to buy math and science books all the time. I probably read 25% of the books I bought. I quit buying books in general after I moved. Moving 500 books sucks.

Now I only buy math and science books if I actually plan to work through them. I usually try to do the problems first and only go back to the writing if I can't figure the problems out. Other books for leisure reading, I just get them at the library.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#48

Post by DaniFong » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 9:59 PM UTC

michael_nielsen wrote: post #31

Maro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my list of distributed papers, I think you're missing quite a few good ones: http://bytepawn.com/readings-in-distributed-systems/ But, more importantly, I'm curious about the 15/3-routine. How often do you do this? Recently I subscribed to the arxiv RSS (astro-ph.co, gr-qc), there's lots of papers uploaded daily, but most don't look very interesting, so 15 interesting ones would be ~1 weeks worth for me.

That's an interesting list on distributed computing, thanks. As regards how often I do this: I go through periods where I do it a lot (sometimes several times in a week), and then months where I don't do it at all. I do it thematically (i.e., with closely related papers), so I've never tried doing something like what you suggest with the arXiv's recent papers. They're usually not all that closely connected.

I approach this in the same pattern. There are some technological tricks that have recently made it much easier, though.

In addition to Arxiv and preprints I can find online, there's Google Scholar and Amazon Previews (I'm still missing many journal articles, especially in engineering, due to a lack of university access, luckily they're often compiled in journals on Amazon). By flipping through Amazon's book previews using the search feature, I can read an arbitrary number of pages in any given book, and the world's library is at my lap. I can then 'photocopy' the relevant/interesting sections using ctrl-shift-command-4 on my Mac, and paste them into my Evernote. In this way I can locate and collate a large number of papers and texts, and organize them along the way without even dipping into LaTeX. After that, I can past those copies into Mathematica, which has a very workable equation typesetter, with the additional advantage of the equations being computable.

Lately I make a lot of use of Evernote, however, which I can pretty much paste anything into, and I can 'photocopy' any part of a text on the computer by using ctrl-shift-command-4 on my Mac.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#49

Post by numberzer0 » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 10:32 PM UTC

It takes me a while to read the books I have as well. I've bought lots of books than I haven't been able to read yet and my list of books to buy and read keeps growing as well. Another thing that adds to the amount of time it takes me to read a book is that I'm a very meticulous reader. I like looking up and cross referencing anything I don't understand, so for me that means looking up lots of stuff. I wonder if other people do this as well.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#50

Post by jlees » Sat, Jun 20, 2009, 10:56 PM UTC

plinkplonk wrote: post #8

In my student days, before I became a working programmer, I was desperately poor and couldn't afford all the books I wanted to buy. So I got into the habit of buying books when I had money in my account to avoid a future in which I have to look longingly at a book and not have money to buy it. So, yes your "buying a book and reading a few years later" situation is something i am familiar with. So anyways, I ended up…

I studied computer science using Cormen et al., and it struck me that this might be one way to 'use' these oft-impenetrable tomes. (Though I really found Cormen very accessible.)

Look around for a university course that teaches using the book, and see if you can find notes, or - better - problems based on the text. Often gives you a sense of where to begin with the larger books.