A reader emailed me about a new online mathematics journal, Rejecta Mathematica. As far as I can tell from reading the FAQ, they only publish articles that have been rejected by peer reviewed journals. The twist is that with your submission, you must include a letter that describes the reasons the paper was rejected as well as any other flaws the paper might have. Submissions are not peer reviewed, and results are not required to be either correct or new, but submissions can be rejected, if they are deemed either incomprehensible or not mathematical.
Author Archives: Walt
EGA and SGA
TeX Finally Made Functional
This is more of a computer programming post than a math post, but since we all use TeX, I thought it might be of general interest. I came across this paper by Heckman and Wilhelm, which describes how to implement TeX’s algorithm for typesetting math formulas in a functional language (namely, ML). We see the output of this algorithm every time we look at a math paper, but until now it lacked a precise formal description other than what was embedded Knuth’s Pascal code. Since Knuth wrote TeX back when computers were much slower and compilers were much dumber, the code contains many hand optimizations that make the logic hard to follow. (The algorithm itself is too complicated to lend itself to a purely verbal description.) By rewriting it in a functional language, the authors are able to turn the algorithm into a well-defined mathematical function.
New laptop rescued
It turns out that Megan does not take no for an answer from hardware. She beat HP’s laptop into Linux submission, so now I have a working laptop. Hopefully regular posting will resume.
New laptop
I bought a new laptop yesterday. I thought my days of skulking around computer labs was over. But no, HP has managed to make a laptop that doesn’t support Linux. These days, you have to go out of your way to not support Linux. So now I have to take it back and try again.
Stata Center
Shalizi on g
If you’re interested in the statistics behind g, the purported general factor that explains the results of intelligence tests, Cosma Shalizi explains all.
Joys of Pedagogy II
This comment by klein4g helped me clarify for myself exactly what my objection to the examples then definition style of teaching. It’s that the author or speaker is pretending that we’re collectively coming up with the common definition as an act of creativity, when in reality there’s a right answer and the author knows it. It’s the pretense that annoys me.
Getting Back on the Bicycle
It looks like I’m going to have to buy a new laptop: the warranty doesn’t cover the current problem. Hopefully I’ll be able to do that soon, and then a more-normal posting schedule will resume.
Joys of Pedagogy
Tim Gowers offers what he considered an uncontroversial pedagogical principle, examples first. He discovered, though, that on the internet there are no uncontroversial topics.
When I started reading Tim’s post, I expected to agree completely with his point. I think I understand subjects almost entirely through examples. I expected him to advocate putting examples before theorems, but he’s actually advocating putting examples before definitions. I dislike that style fairly strongly; it’s like being led down a road by someone who already knows the destination, but they won’t tell me where we’re going until we actually get there.