[ABE.pm] Concrete Mathematics (a.k.a. Yo, Walt!)

[Ted Fiedler]

This may have been posted here before, but

http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html

is a fairly good resource for 'free as in beer' math books.

Ted
On 9/6/07, Walt Mankowski <waltman at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 09:16:06PM -0400, Faber J. Fedor wrote:
> > On 05/09/07 23:28 -0400, Walt Mankowski wrote:
> > > On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 10:49:58PM -0400, Faber J. Fedor wrote:
> > > Sorry, I've never read Concrete Mathematics.  About all I know about
> > > it is that it's printed in an odd boxy font that Knuth created just
> > > for that book.  I skimmed through it in Drexel's library just to look
> > > at it.  I think it's ugly. :)
> >
> > That explains the look!  I've got a copy from a Japanese publisher and
> > thought it looked... dated.
>
> Yes, it's a weird font.  Everything else I've seen published by him
> uses Computer Modern, so I wonder if maybe he didn't like it either.
>
> > > Offhand I'd think that if you could handle the math you see getting a
> > > BS/MS in EE, you could handle anything Knuth would throw at you.  But
> > > maybe not.  Comp Sci math tends to focus on different things than what
> > > real engineers do.  Stuff like Jacobians, gradiants, and other
> > > calculus things show up in subfields like computer vision, but not so
> > > much in analyzing algorithms.
> >
> > I think that's my problem.  As an example, in CM, they're analyzing "the
> > Jospehus prolem" which is analyzing an algorithm and it all seems murky
> > to me. They make a couple of leaps that I can't work through. It's
> > almost as if I'm missing something basic.
>
> Hmm...maybe I'll check it out of the library tomorrow and see what's
> going on.
>
> The book I (sort of) used as an undergrad is Herbert Wilf's
> "Algorithms and Complexity".  He's a professor at Penn, and my class
> were the guinea pigs as he was finishing it up.  He published it
> shortly after the term ended, and it reads a lot like his lectures.
>
> Wilf has the entire pdf of his book online at
> http://www.math.upenn.edu/%7Ewilf/AlgComp3.html, so you can skim
> through it if you'd like.  It might be good to see the basic concepts
> explained in a slightly different way.
>
> > > I suppose it's also possible that your math's gotten a little rusty.
> > > I know mine was when I started back at Drexel.  I still feel behind
> > > some of the recent grads.
> >
> > That's one of the reasons I'm going back and revisiting some of my
> > maths.  I worked through a complex analysis book this pass summer and
> > the book I'm reading has me all hopped up to learn modern (abstract)
> > algebra. But none of that has to do with analyzing algorithms!
>
> Abstract algebra's very cool, but it doesn't seem to come up very
> often in analyzing algorithms.
>
> Walt
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-- 
If you mess with a thing long enough, it'll break.
                -- Schmidt
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