markgall · HackerTrans

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 Clifford and exterior algebras, but this debate has never reached me.

markgall

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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 Mathematica I now do in sage, and I don't think I'm the only one. Probably field-dependent though.

Of course there is a whole constellation of more specialized things in certain fields, that has come a long way in the last 15 years. So people needing things like that no longer kludge things together in Mathematica.

markgall

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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.

markgall

2 ay öncediscuss

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-insignificant role in the university's rise in the last 10-20 years.

Universities love this and encourage it. Any big place will have an office of "technology transfer" or similar to help researchers make this happen.

markgall

3 ay öncediscuss

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 = 0

There's not a simple formula for this function (which is the basic point), but certainly it is a function: you feed it five real numbers as input, and it spits out one number as output. The proof that you can't generate this function using the single one given looks like some fairly routine Galois theory.

Whether this function is "considered elementary" depends on who you ask. Most people would not say this is elementary, but the author would like to redefine the term to include it, which would make the theorem not true anymore.

Why any of this would shake the foundations of computer engineering I do not know.

markgall

3 ay öncediscuss

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", or anything similarly grandiose?

I am a professional mathematician, though nowhere near this kind of thing. The result seems amusing enough, but it doesn't really strike me as something that would be surprising. I confess that this thread is the first I've heard of it...

markgall

4 ay öncediscuss

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

markgall

6 ay öncediscuss

> 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 "decades away."

> Exponential growth reaches infinity at t=∞. Technically a singularity, but an infinitely patient one. Moore's Law was exponential. We are no longer on Moore's Law.

Huh? I don't get it. e^t would also still be finite at heat death.

markgall

6 ay öncediscuss

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.

markgall

6 ay öncediscuss

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 and sit back it will occasionally make a random blunder and then you grind it out. I figured it's how they were able to weaken a chess engine back in the day; can't adjust the overall strength, so add random blunders.

I'm only about 2000 on lichess but I beat it pretty much every time, especially once I realized there is no reason to try anything sharp.

markgall

9 ay öncediscuss

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 few days. It's good enough for most of my work, though modern web-browsing is a challenge. (Maybe one that somebody has solved, I haven't dug at all.)

markgall

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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 theorem out of AI. I think the day is clearly coming but it's not here.

markgall

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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 removed infinite series from the curriculum altogether. Epsilon/delta proofs were removed from the AP exam not so long ago. Some calculus classes don't use any transcendental functions because students can't handle it. At the same time grades have gone up, I suspect mostly because exams are usually weighted less than they were in the old days.

It is probably true however that there is more of a baseline expectation that you take it in high school. Whether this is sensible I do not know. It is also true that the very best students are better than ever, because the materials on the internet have gotten better and better over time.

markgall

2 yıl öncediscuss

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 Makefile or similar. I keep my transactions spread across quite a few separate files for different accounts, and the actual commands I issue to include the right files are very long. Similarly I have various plotting and summary scripts whose exact syntax I don't usually remember. But with make I can just "make cashflow" "make balance 'A=Checking'" "make balance-plot 'A=retirement'" and so on.

markgall

2 yıl öncediscuss

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 statements to ledger; the amount of stuff I do by hand is minimal enough that it would be easy to live without the emacs mode.

markgall

2 yıl öncediscuss

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 and then run scripts to convert them to ledger format and append only the things after a given cutoff date (things like the credit card script are pretty interactive so I don't want to overwrite the old data). To know which accounts are in most dire need of a check, I have a script that shows the last transaction on each statement-generating account.

This basically works for me and catching up doesn't really take long. There are some accounts that I update very infrequently, but I've gotten over my OCD about this and it doesn't really matter. My wife doesn't appreciate being hassled for the statement from her work HSA every month -- nor does it really matter how much is in there at any given moment, unless we have a big medical expense -- so we just occasionally sit down and catch everything up, maybe twice a year.

Overall I find the automation means it's vastly less work than when I used gnucash, and the flexibility in expense structures and ease of assigning things mean I have much better budget data than when I used mint.com.

markgall

2 yıl öncediscuss

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 not-that-big states away.

They don't make it easy. Last year I had a reimbursement rejected because I took a two-night train option instead of flying -- the finance office considered this a vacation. Any time you do anything other than fly you need to provide comparison data showing that flying would've cost more. But those who fly even when the train is reasonable (for a normal person) face no such requirement.

markgall

2 yıl öncediscuss

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

markgall

2 yıl öncediscuss

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-ish, but it does have a good bit of math (more than GR at least), and a DFW fan would probably like it. Stella Maris (McCarthy) is perhaps neither DFW-ish nor math-ish, but it is Serious Fiction centered on a mathematician and is probably the best work of fiction to feature Alexander Grothendieck. I have heard that Solenoid (Cartarescu) has some math in it, though I fear it's still sitting on my shelf. Every Arc Bends Its Radian (due in a couple months from Sergio De La Pava) has a math-ish title but I doubt it will actually contain much math.

Michael Harris -- a mathematician who wrote a review of the DFW Infinity book -- has a book called "Mathematics Without Apologies", which I liked, though it's non-fiction. There is also "Birth of a Theorem" by Fields medalist Cedric Villani which is an interesting read -- not fiction, but it is experimental in many respects and I would say worth a read.

markgall

2 yıl öncediscuss

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-harris.pdf

As a DFW lover whose day job is as a mathematician... that book's a clunker.

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