Favourite Quote for the Day

Loosely speaking we can think of automata, grammar and computability as the study of what can be done by computers in principle, while complexity addresses what can be done in practice.

Peter Linz

Crazy mathematics

As I was shifting my books from one location to another, I found a big heap of books, I had not even started reading or looked at in detail. Being me, I got distracted by them and decided to at-least give them a chance to fulfill their destiny (to be read cover to cover by their owners or the friends of the owners).

I started with Tom Apostol's Mathematical Analysis. It is a wonderfully terse book and I found myself struggling by the time I reached the topic on "Point Set Topology". I had been through a quick journey of the past - real and complex numbers, sets and cardinality, prime numbers and many more things.

I also ran into the famous Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. I remember having proved the inequality in the exercise of Don Knuth's Art of computer programming volume I, but by now I had forgotten it all -- the sum manipulation, the whole of chapter 1 as hiding somewhere in my memory and seeking it was a hard/impossible task. This time, I found myself taking the help of a symbolic computation package - maxima. My dialog was as follows

(%i2) expand((a1^2 + a2^2)*(b1^2 + b2^2));
(%o2) a2^2*b2^2+a1^2*b2^2+a2^2*b1^2+a1^2*b1^2
(%i4) expand((a1b1 + a2b2)^2);
(%o4) a2b2^2+2*a1b1*a2b2+a1b1^2

(%i31) (a1^2 + a2^2)*(b1^2 + b2^2) - ((a1b1 + a2b2)^2);
(%o31) (a2^2+a1^2)*(b2^2+b1^2)-(a2b2+a1b1)^2
(%i32) expand(%);
(%o32) a2^2*b2^2+a1^2*b2^2+a2^2*b1^2+a1^2*b1^2-a2b2^2-2*a1b1*a2b2-a1b1^2

To cut the long output short, I ended up with Lagrange's inequality.

This is just a small part of the mathematics I have to (re)learn, there is also graph theory, game theory, probability theory, Markov chains and theory of computation.

All the mathematics is very exciting, but time consuming. I have loads of other information to read and digest. Let's see where all this I need to learn this crazy math attitude takes me.

Have a fantastic new year 2008

It's that time again, a year has gone by, brought happiness and sad moments, but it's gone! Remember to change the year in your dates, make new year resolutions, start afresh, be more positive, thankful and happy that we have a new chance to do/make things right.

HAVE A GREAT NEW YEAR and make every day count