slackenerny

It is my experience that people in casual conversations automatically assume topic to be complexity theory, despite I'm in Europe.

Or maybe I will, just a bit ;) Because in fact, in casual conversations noone seem to be insiting, or in fact using adj. theoretical when talking about languages, semantics, logic, universal algebra, category theory. This is computer science after all, no need for special adjectives. It would be a bit like calling category theory a "theoretical mathematics".

Fact is, major part of the community uses term exclusively in the meaning we talk about. It could be argued if rightly and people outside may justifiably think in broader sense. Maybe better words could be found instead of theoretical, such as "analytical", and in fact I recall one of European departments reorganizing into two institutes, one for "Analytical CS".

You obviously didn't read the thread.

Highlighted therein is the contrast between TCS scenes in US and Europe. That is the amichail's point. These are two separate communities scarcely communicating with each other.

In the "first dozen of comments" you have Mitzenmacher, member of program committee of leading US conference comparing your field's importance and utility for TCS (as defined in the US) with that of e.g. chemistry's.

You're wrong in the "not shared by many" part.

http://weblog.fortnow.com/2009/03/lets-congradulate-gerard-h...

It's just Bern Strumfels running his research program, which is somewhat obscure even for algebraic geometrers. He is an expert on algorithms of algebraic geometry and their applications e.g. to optimization, and whatnot. There was a thematic school on that, videos should be buried somewhere here, http://www.ima.umn.edu/2006-2007/. This may be interesting line of research—for a mathematician—or ML person willing to learn stacks of pure mathematics leading to fluency with at least the book by Cox, Little and O'Shea just to make sense of labels on buttons.

(It was his campaign to effectiveness of which many, including me, were sceptical.)

Further discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=816217

(I saw it in the previous announcement, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743881)

Ed: Also PG could clarify what he scribbled on there.. http://c0139491.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/photos/231... I deciphered only 8 first characters from the first line (Happy ha*); also, G in PG looks exactly like my handwritten &, which is lovely, but nobody will believe me I haven't forged that.

Dirac said, “follow mathematical idea wherever it leads”. When I first opened ths book years ago, unpublished draft then, I just skimmed the ToC, checked a few problems and then to my horror encountered that interesting approach to restricted three–body problem (nicely wrapped as the “Jupiter” problem in the book). I was horrified because I had a lead on that too… and there – it's all in textbooks. That situation allowed no relaxed wackiness in my thinking about it anymore, I had to formulate my thoughts. ‘I need more math’, I thought. When I finally digged out of that rabbit hole I found myself learned in dynamical systems, ergodic theory, harmonic analysis, spectral theory, operator algebras, homology, algebraic topology, and constructive renormalization, and in numerical methods, symbolic dynamics, symbolic algebra, Grobner bases and group cohomology and applied algebraic geometry, and then Hopf algebra of Connes–Kreimer computable renormalization and, uh, followed Connes the way up to motivic integration… (ok. ok. I'm done enumerating now) at which point I lost all interest in physics and turned mathematician.

All that not to mention intersection of algebra and topology of statistical mechanics with coding theory and infromation theory which led me to machine learning (which is just statistics btw).

I'm unsure what the moral is. That was not healthy. (OTOH, mathematicians have high life expectancy, routinely living up to 90, gauging from AMS Notices obituareis).

Sadly it's very true; there is hardly more damning praise in physics than "diligent hard worker".

Scroll over to “Five Minutes of Knot Theory History” for a short video from demonstration class: http://www.southalabama.edu/mathstat/personal_pages/silver

That said, notations here really correspond to different ways of thinking and are important and shouldn't be ridden.

Guy Steele's ‘Fortress’ language is headed in that direction.

I think it was done that way once, but somewhere around seventies people dropped or moved this to advanced courses. You can't immediately solve a transformer in differential forms like the way you can by mindless symbolic manipulation over the standard formalism.

If the unwashed masses suddenly gain access to such capabilities effortlessly then it would be a concern. Presently it is not, because smart phones have GSM subsystems carefully separated and ‘dumb’ phones have certain limitations built in. Behaving graciously is assumed a mobile station's role in the GSM system.

Recall the Nokia 1100 rumor eariler this year where underground allegedly gained acces to frimware memory map of certain series of this phone and its price skyrocketed on second hand market.

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/07/light_mills.html

A toy simulation:

http://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/LightMill/LightMill.html

Then there is a problem how to differentiate between them further.

This is where the concept of "fit" comes in, where the recruiting board tries to enrich the "social experince" of this particular microsociety. For example, thinking is, a group of physics graduate students living in the dorms may enjoy a little improvised cello performance by one of them. This happened to my friend. He had a very strong application but, no doubt equally strong, cellist was choosen. My friend had to work part time for the greatest part of the year to afford undergraduate studies at all and it never occured to him that a cello, or any other extracurricular activity (for which he wouldn't have time anyways) was that important to be a well-rounded physicist.

When the RMSE of a submitted prediction set on the quiz subset improves beyond the qualifying RMSE an electronic announcement will inform all registered Participants that they have thirty (30) days to submit additional candidate prediction sets to be considered for judging. At the end of this period, qualifying submissions will be judged (see Judging below) in order of the largest improvement over the qualifying RMSE on the test subset.

Buying form corporate line has an additional benefit that one can use a docking station for all the external monitors, hard drives, mouse, keybord, speakers and the ethernet cable. Of course I know ThinkPads do have a docking connector too, but Macs do not and I hardly understand how people can trade convenience and commodity price for a shiny paint that wears off from sweat in under a year and a shiny GUI that annoys me (maybe it's just me) almost as Windows does.

Tell that to physicists “renormalizing”† it over and over all days long…

† I almost forgot not everyone on HN may know what that is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization

I don't grok this argument, when would one like to have that?

For me personally J is all about tacit functional programming. Any APL have this?

http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/adcolkey.html