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

[Walt Mankowski]

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