This may have been posted here before, but <br><br><a href="http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html">http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html</a><br><br>is a fairly good resource for 'free as in beer' math books.
<br><br>Ted<br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/6/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Walt Mankowski</b> <<a href="mailto:waltman@pobox.com">waltman@pobox.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 09:16:06PM -0400, Faber J. Fedor wrote:<br>> On 05/09/07 23:28 -0400, Walt Mankowski wrote:<br>> > On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 10:49:58PM -0400, Faber J. Fedor wrote:<br>> > Sorry, I've never read Concrete Mathematics. About all I know about
<br>> > it is that it's printed in an odd boxy font that Knuth created just<br>> > for that book. I skimmed through it in Drexel's library just to look<br>> > at it. I think it's ugly. :)<br>
><br>> That explains the look! I've got a copy from a Japanese publisher and<br>> thought it looked... dated.<br><br>Yes, it's a weird font. Everything else I've seen published by him<br>uses Computer Modern, so I wonder if maybe he didn't like it either.
<br><br>> > Offhand I'd think that if you could handle the math you see getting a<br>> > BS/MS in EE, you could handle anything Knuth would throw at you. But<br>> > maybe not. Comp Sci math tends to focus on different things than what
<br>> > real engineers do. Stuff like Jacobians, gradiants, and other<br>> > calculus things show up in subfields like computer vision, but not so<br>> > much in analyzing algorithms.<br>><br>> I think that's my problem. As an example, in CM, they're analyzing "the
<br>> Jospehus prolem" which is analyzing an algorithm and it all seems murky<br>> to me. They make a couple of leaps that I can't work through. It's<br>> almost as if I'm missing something basic.
<br><br>Hmm...maybe I'll check it out of the library tomorrow and see what's<br>going on.<br><br>The book I (sort of) used as an undergrad is Herbert Wilf's<br>"Algorithms and Complexity". He's a professor at Penn, and my class
<br>were the guinea pigs as he was finishing it up. He published it<br>shortly after the term ended, and it reads a lot like his lectures.<br><br>Wilf has the entire pdf of his book online at<br><a href="http://www.math.upenn.edu/%7Ewilf/AlgComp3.html">
http://www.math.upenn.edu/%7Ewilf/AlgComp3.html</a>, so you can skim<br>through it if you'd like. It might be good to see the basic concepts<br>explained in a slightly different way.<br><br>> > I suppose it's also possible that your math's gotten a little rusty.
<br>> > I know mine was when I started back at Drexel. I still feel behind<br>> > some of the recent grads.<br>><br>> That's one of the reasons I'm going back and revisiting some of my<br>> maths. I worked through a complex analysis book this pass summer and
<br>> the book I'm reading has me all hopped up to learn modern (abstract)<br>> algebra. But none of that has to do with analyzing algorithms!<br><br>Abstract algebra's very cool, but it doesn't seem to come up very
<br>often in analyzing algorithms.<br><br>Walt<br>_______________________________________________<br>ABE-pm mailing list<br><a href="mailto:ABE-pm@pm.org">ABE-pm@pm.org</a><br><a href="http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/abe-pm">
http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/abe-pm</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>If you mess with a thing long enough, it'll break.<br> -- Schmidt