Reading List and Rewiring

I am in the middle of rethinking my personal research and to that end debating about how much of my current reading list I should stick to. Here is what I have planned for the next couple of months:

Filed under: Books, Computer Science, DEK, Google, Mathematics, Rants

True IPL TRP Stats

Doug Hofstadter might find it amusing. But I find it incredibly annoying that when I want to read news online, I see news about news or media reporting about media or celebrity gossip about media celebrities. Talk about self-serving institutions. Being very interested in Statistics, all this recent Trash-Talk about Television ratings for the Indian Premier League got me interested in the methodology used for measuring TRP ratings.

Filed under: Computer Science, General, Mathematics

Turing: Complete, Godel: Incomplete

Far too much of my time in recent years has been spent by an all consuming obsession to understand Turing’s original proof as outlined in “On Computable Numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”. Much like Alice in Wonderland in pre-teen years and Super Mario Bros. of teenage yore, I suspect there was very little value in spending time thusly. But there is light at the end of the tunnel and for some vague definition of “complete”, I call my study of Turing’s paper done for the time being.

Filed under: Computer Science, Mathematics

Gulliver and the Markov Chain

Long long ago, before Claude Shannon modeled the distribution of English Words as a Markov process, before Larry and Sergey modeled the Random Surfer as a Markov Chain on the Graph of the Internet, before SciGen made Markov Chains the legend of Slashdot, before even Monte-Carlo and Metropolis-Hastings, there was Jonathan Swift.

Filed under: Books, Computer Science, Dublin, Mathematics

Topology Rocks

What is incomputable in two dimensions becomes computable in three. Fantastic intuitive explanation and visualization of Smale’s Paradox:

Filed under: Mathematics