Reading: Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra

I finished reading this book the other day. Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra was very good because it filled in some of the background of the development and growth of Algebra throughout history. The wars in Europe had a profound effect on many mathematicians and their work.

Some time after the first of the year, I think I will reread it and take notes as I read it. There are some concepts that could be more firmly fixed in my brain.

Tags: Books

Blog Reading

It's been awhile since I posted one of these histograms....



Metafilter got the axe awhile back. Some blogs seem less active as we head into the holiday season....

First Snow!

It started snowing about half an hour ago.  Some of our Thanksgiving visitors are looking forward to it.  The snow may or may not stick, but the weather forecast for the coming week makes snow quite possible.

Update November 20: It has dropped a bit more snow the last two nights. There is snow on the ground, but not the roads (they are a bit slushy). Yesterday I took a quick pass with the snow shovel on the driveway---just in case. Today I cleared the front porch.

GTK (or TLAs yet again)

I've spent far too many hours this week looking over GTK information and trying to install GTK on OS X (both Leopard (OS X 10.5) and Tiger (OS X 10.4)). I thought I'd make one more attempt at it this morning, but have reached the conclusion it isn't worth the time, especially after finding a blog post GTK vs QT (thanks to Google) on the subject.

This is not the first time I have spent too much time on GTK. The first time was about two and a half years ago. I had heard about and seen some posts about the GIMP, so I thought it might be interesting to investigate, especially since it used a library (GTK) that supported standard graphics and user interface elements. After about a week, I gave up on both the GIMP and GTK. How could I get students to use something that took this long to install (and didn't work 100%). During my search for more information, I read about Qt (I had heard about it many years ago, but didn't really pursue it).

My experience with Qt has been much better. My first installation had some problems, so I gave it one more try and it worked (it took about eight hours to compile on my old G4 laptop). At some time, the folks at TrollTech started to release Qt as disk images, making the install process much easier.

Guess it's time to go back to looking at PyQt, since PyGTK isn't going to happen anytime soon for me.

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Too many TLAs above? I posted More TLAs a little over a year ago.

GIMP GNU Image Manipulation Program
GTK The GIMP Toolkit
PyGTK a set of Python bindings for the GTK framework
PyQt a set of Python bindings for Qt application framework

Solution to "The Theory of Everything"?

Saw an interesting post on Dvorak Uncensored on Thursday entitiled "Has A Surfer Dude Solved ‘The Theory of Everything’?" I'm always a sucker for stories about surfer dudes having spent a lot of time in San Diego while growing up, so I read the post. After the post, I clicked on the link to a more detailed story Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything. It had links to the guy's (A. Garrett Lisi) work and life. Interesting reading!

It never ceases to amuse me how the media plays up the surfing aspect of someone that is successful. They did the same thing when J. Craig Venter was at the leading the charge in decoding the human genome a few years ago. Then again, there was the fairly recent story about the aging rock star (Brian May of Queen) going back to finish his PhD in Astrophysics. Some sort of leveling, or is it that surprising that nerds do something other than read books and work on computers?

Update November 18, 2007: A friend of mine from graduate school (M has a PhD in Physics and follows the Physics world quite closely) pointed me to a post by Dr. Sean Carrol "Garrett Lisi's Theory of Everything" about the paper. Garrett has posted a few comments in response. He continues to seem very humble about his work.

Update November 20, 2007: Decided to poke around and see if there was any further activity regarding Garrett's paper. There was! The BackReaction blog posted A Theoretically Simple Exception of Everything. The comments are interesting, as Dr. Lisi responded to several commenters. After reading the post and comments, I clicked on Garrett's name in one of his responses. It took me to Deferential Geometry his wiki. The wiki is interesting---at times you could see it rendering what looked like TeX for the links.... A little poking revealed that he is using TiddlyWiki, created by Jeremy Ruston, and jsMath, made by Davide P. Cervone. They work well together!

Speed Download by Yazsoft

Last week I saw several posts (Borkware Miniblog and NSLog();) about using Speed Download to download Leopard from Apple. I was a bit skeptical, but had tagged one of them in Google Reader for later. After installing Leopard yesterday, I needed to install a newer version of TeX. After about two/three hours, the download terminated in the middle (about 350 of 740 MB). My first thought was to start it again, my second thought was "hmm, I should try that Speed Download application."

A few minutes later, Speed Download was installed and I was ready to go. First I had to find the URL at the CTAN (the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network) which wasn't as easy as it should be.... Click start and about two hours later I had the latest version of MacTeX.

Yazsoft's Speed Download is now on my least of applications to purchase!