Peterbe.com

My near-future hope is to set up my own weblog where each new blog item is my write-up of notes from my math lectures. The purpose of this is twofold:

• Study my notes from lectures
• Learn more about web development with odd content/format

I then need to be able to write mathematical expressions in my HTML using TeX syntax and have the expressions converted to images. TeX (father of LaTeX (father of Itex)) looks like this:

\[ \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n} \text{ is divergent, 
but }  \lim_{n \to \infty} \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{1}{i}
- \ln n \text{ exists.}\]

You can hopefully see the results here

This needs to be converted then somehow. Now, what I've found is itex2MML which looks promising. There's no double-clickable installer get this up and running, but altogether this might help me learn more about Debian (what this server runs on).

I've so far had a look at latex2html but it doesn't work yet and there's a lot of management with imagefiles and the conversion is pretty slow. If I can't work it out with MathML, I'll give latex2html another bash.

Some links for this little project:

• MathML in Mozilla (unofficial, old)
• MathML in Mozilla
• Fonts for MathML-enabled Mozilla
• Itex2MML main page
• Itex2MML File conversion
• About Itex
• mathmled - MathML Editor for Mozilla
• Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 2.0 (Second Edition)
• More about Latex2HTML and Mathematics

Today I got my new keyboard. A Microsoft Internet Keyboard. It's exactly like the one I had before. The old one work just fine except that the keys were starting to get squeaky. The difference is very subtle but I felt I had to punch the keys from directly upwards. With this new one it's so much easier to type. Small difference on the outside but a really big difference for me.

Today I've also had my first "Object Oriented Programming in C++" lecture and lab. This is as far as we got today:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
   cout << "Hello world!\n";
   return 0;
}

Actually we did a few more things. Next lecture I think we'll start with classes and stuff. A requirement for this course is that you already know programming (in Java) so we'll be able to skip while loops and if statements. Good.

Today was also the first lecture in Bottom Up Computing and Discrete Mathematics. A combination of elementary discrete math plus some general knowledge of how computers work. We'll even have a lab where we take apart a laptop to learn about the hardware inside. This lecture we spent discussing how Google's PageRank works. I'm looking forward to doing some serious math on algorithms like this. It will help a lot in understanding how Google does it.

Translated (by me) from a Swedish science magazine I bought when I flew back to the UK a couple of days ago:

"How old is your dad?" Karin asked, "he looks much older than my dad". "Ridiculous!", Betty replied somewhat angry over her friends insensitivity, "but now you'll see if you can work it out. His age is three times the first digit plus five times the last." How old is he?

If you can work it out. Don't just tell me an answer you've come up with by testing several numbers. Show me some proof!

At the moment I'm here in a snowy Sweden in my parents house, with a cold and worries about not studying enough during this break.

It now appears to be so that I have to take two exams on the same day and same hour. What they do then is that they arrange so that I can take one of the two exams later in the afternoon. It is only me who has this clash of two exams on the same day and hour.

They will then have to "supervise" during the day so that I can't have any contact with my fellow students. I wonder how they do that. In fact I'm now curious to find out. Are they going to have some goon to follow me around wherever I go? Will I not be able to have my mobile on?

Well, we'll see what happens.
For now: Happy New Year

We're doing a project on this in the Data Structures and Algorithm. The game of Tangram is simple. You've got 7 pieces of certain size and shape. Two are idientical, so thus 5 unique ones.

Try the game and see if you can work it out.

The total number of solutions is HUGE and our project is about sorting and storing information about solutions. We don't have to populate the storage but to at least have a principle of deciphering a shape into some sort of code.

Any ideas?

So it started today. Term I on my third and last year of Mathematical Science with Computer Science at City University.

The lectures I had today were Data Structures & Algorithms and Fluid Dynamics

Both are potentially interesting. The DSA course might be "too easy" since I have programming experience from before and most people in the course don't. Lecturer seems alrite but I've never seen a lecturer so nervous before. Maybe it was just because it was his first lecture too.

Fluid Dynamics may be difficult but it's good with challanges. Looking forward to do this module.