The Spy Among Us

Everybody (at least those about my age) can remember stories of espionage that involved some daredevil using a variety of skills to gain access to important information held by the enemy. Cary Grant in Monaco, in a palace, at night……dodging nefarious enemies to steal information for the good guys.

So, today in class, comes a student that I thought had dropped. Hasn’t been around for the last week.

First thing I notice is that he has a digital camera. As the class fills, but before the professor arrives, he turns around and asks the girl sitting behind him if he can look at her notes for the last week. She assents, hands over her notebook, and he proceeds to take pictures of every page. Unbelievable……….

He’s gonna go home, download to his laptop, and save the notes. Then he’s gonna print some hard copies (or not).

How cool is that……….

Happy Pi Day

For those in the know, today is a big day for Pi, the source of most of my difficulties in calculus.

Pi, Greek letter (), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi = 3.1415926535… Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th.

Read it all………

The Devil Himself

From Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, Sixth Edition, by Kenneth Rosen:

Abu Ja’Far Mohammed Ibn Musa al-Khowarizmi (C. 780 – C. 850)

al Khowarizmi, an astronomer and mathematician, was a member of the House of Wisdom, an academy of scientists in Baghdad. The name al-Khowarizmi means “from the town of Kowarzizm,” which was then part of Persia, but is now called Khiva and is part of Uzbekistan. al-Khowarizmi wrote books on mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Western Europeans first learned about algebra from his works. The word algebra comes from al-jabr, part of the title of his book Kitab al-jabr w’al muquabala. The book was translated into Latin and was a widely used textbook. His book on the use of Hindu numerals describes procedures for arithmetic operations using these numerals. European authors used a Latin corruption of his name, which later evolved to the word algorithm, to describe the subject of arithmetic with Hindu numerals.

My two most favorite words, algebra and algorithm, from the mind of one man………who knew?

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Golly Gee!

The end of the worst week of my (new) college life is near. All that is required of me tomorrow is that I attend my classes. No more tests, assignments, projects, or any other forms of professorial torture.

The week actually began its hellish transformation late last week when a programming assignment appeared on our class web-site, with a pretty short deadline…..Tuesday at midnight. This development put a serious kink in my carefully developed schedule…..that was already filled to bursting.

Discrete Structures test Monday at 11AM. Stats II test Wednesday at 9AM, followed by an assignment in DataSets due at 2PM. Computer Science (programming) test Thursday. Calculus take home quiz due Friday at 8AM.

No, I was not happy to get the news about the programming assignment. Java remains almost impenetrable….the language so dense that it’s nearly impossible to develop algorithms. I’m too busy trying to get the damn program to compile to worry about whether or not the code actually works. The only array working for me is the dis-array in my brain.

As for Discrete Structures, let’s just say that my mind is the empty set and be done with it.

Ahhh, stats. I can give you the best damn z-statistic with multiple levels of significance, and a great confidence interval, in the neatest hand you ever did see……if I can ever figure out which test goes with what set of circumstances. Sheesh.

Calculus speaks for itself. Using the product rule inside the chain rule for a trig function is proof that the Devil had Sir Isaac and Prof. Leibnitz firmly under his control.

Datasets is not too bad, but I’m sure I’ll have a different opinion after that test on Monday. Perhaps I can use my putative query skills to comb the ocean of information for meaningful work in the long-haul trucking industry (a long cherished fantasy of my wife).

The good news in all this that the cycle doesn’t repeat until late March. The bad news is that the cycle repeats.

The only bright spot in this 168 hour long body-cavity search is that my professors have, to a person, been available, willing to teach individually, and patient beyond belief. In the words of just about any author (even that career option looks good, right now), any acts of omission are the fault of your scribe.

I know how Sisyphus felt.

DeMorgan’s Laws

Not (A or B) is the logical equivalent of Not A and Not B.

Trust me when I tell you that the difference is very, very important in the construction of a while loop….

Thanks, Patrick.

Time & Logic

My Discrete Math professor is the same gentleman who shepherded (if that is the right word) me through my first Calculus class last semester. Seeing his name on the schedule for this class, then, was not disturbing. For me, he is a known quantity, and a good professor. And, like most of the professors encountered on this journey, he is very giving of his time outside of the class. On the first day of each course, he lets the class vote on the most opportune times for his “extra help” sessions, adjusting his schedule to suit the needs of the majority of the students. He will be available at that time for any student, with any question.

I have attended his sessions this semester. If I may speak in the terms of a logician, I in this case implies the existential quantification: As in, of all the students in the universe of discourse (his class), there exists 1 student who has attended his “extra help” sessions.

I am that existential quantifier.

Today, while exploring the labyrinth of nested quantifiers during the “extra-help”, he made the most remarkable comment.

As I recall, we were talking about implications in a proposition: x implies y….or, if p, then q…..you get the drift. A relationship exists between two variables.

As he said, the logical relationship exists, but that the rules of logic ignore the existence of time. That is, the logic assumes that the relationship is timeless, until one of the variables changes. He further stated that he suspects the existence of a physical, universal law that must apply to logic and time. Even though he can prove, through logic, that an implication is not timeless, he has not yet persuaded his wife, a fellow mathematician, that his argument is true. Thus, the theory awaits further development.

This is beautiful stuff!

Why I Love Mathematics…

One of the few endearing characteristics of my Calculus textbook is the sidebars sprinkled randomly through the book…..where the author attempts to instill some small bits of humanity in the almost mechanical process of acquiring the knowledge of calculus. For example, in the section of the “Mean Value Theorem”, we learn that the MVT was first formulated by Joseph-Louis Lagrange

….”born in Italy of a French father and an Italian mother. He was a child prodigy and became a professor in Turin at the tender age of 19….He was a kind and quiet man, though, living only for science.” Bully for him, I say.

Then in my Discrete Mathematics textbook, in the section dealing with “Constructing New Logical Equivalences”, the sidebar contains this story (excerpted for the sake of brevity) about Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelance (1815 – 1852):

“Augusta Ada was the only child from the marriage of the famous poet Lord Byron and Lady Byron, Annabella Milbanke, who separated when Ada was 1 month old, becasue of Lord Byron’s scandalous affair with his half-sister. The Lord Byron had quite a reputation, being described by one of his lovers as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know‘. Lady Byron was noted for her intellect and had a passion for mathematics; she was called by Lord Byron ‘The Princess of Parallelograms’. In 1838 Augusta Ada married Lord King, later elevated to Earl of Lovelance. Together they had three children…

…Ada continued her mathematical studies after her marriage. Charles Babbage had continued work on his Analytic Engine…In 1842 Babbage asked Augusta Ada to translate an article in French describing Babbage’s invention….

She recognized the promises of the machine as a general purpose computer much better than Babbage did. She stated that the “engine is the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity‘. Her notes on the Analytic Engine anticipate many future developments, including computer-generated music. After 1845 she and Babbage worked toward the development of a system to predict horse races. Unfortunately, their system did not work well, leaving Augusta heavily in debt at the time of her death at an unfortunately young age from uterine cancer.”

How can I not appreciate the work of such people without seeing their humanity and frailties as the perfect expression of the human form?

Abe, the Logician

“How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This will be of great assistance in my comprehension of logic.

Thanks to Overcoming Bias.

Starting My Engine

Tomorrow’s the big day……the start of the spring semester. Books bought, parking paid, pencils sharpened, and as much preparatory studying under my belt as my wife and friends would countenance. Truth is, I’ve been ready for tomorrow for a month of yesterdays. Walking the campus yesterday, it was good to see former classmates, former professors, and a few future professors also readying for the journey.

Ready, set Go!!!!!!!