[PD-dev] ... introducing myself. was Re: can pdvjtools have a place in your cvs external repository?

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, Sergi Lario wrote:

> Four years later, without being sure about what to study i decided to
> start Maths in the University of Barcelona.

You will find that even though Miller won the Putnam and has a doctorate 
in Math, and even though I have a bachelor's in Math too, it's still rare 
to see Sylow subgroups and Noether isomorphisms around here. At best I 
could find one guy in one conf who was using pd in relationship to "free 
monoïds"... I have the impression that it was a once-in-a-lifetime 
happening.

I try to plug isomorphisms around, when I can, but still no luck for 
Noether's theorems... :}

Still there is quite a bit of other kinds of interesting math that is more 
commonplace in pd... especially FFT, but also, I did use 
eigendecomposition as a way to convert an ellipse equation to an angle and 
two radiuses.

> I spent i couple of years without before i left, but there i learnt 
> math's abstractions and programming basics, that was worth it!

IMHO, a lot of computer science and software engineering could count as 
math, given how much the topic of math has expanded in the last ~200 
years... I have the impression that the last 50 years were pretty much the 
addition of "except stuff related to computers" to the definition of what 
math is. The problem with that is that those topics are also related to 
the understanding of the processes of math using math itself - making math 
more recursive and "self-aware"...

Anyway, I still think that a math education is interesting, as long as you 
didn't limit yourself to what you had to study for the exam, and that you 
try to mentally connect math to as much of your experience as possible 
instead of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28psychology%29
(a kind of insanity that is considered perfectly normal when it comes 
to some university degrees ... ;-)

I think that there's plenty of room to make pd more "mathy" but that 
non-math people might not necessarily recognise those concepts as being 
math, and a lot of them have mental association of the word "math" with 
the situation of just following rules without making sense of them, for 
the benefit of getting good grades from bad teachers...

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada