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Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Want to know about the History of Indian mathematics?

Go here http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Indexes/Indians.html .

This sums it all:

QUOTE

The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. the importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.

UNQUOTE


Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

See the anagram of your name

Did you know New York Times can be reconfigured as "monkeys write" ? Check out what your name can be reconfigured as at http://wordsmith.org/anagram/index.html . This is an internet anagram server maintained by Anu Garg.

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Got a spoiled kid? Take her to Indian slums

An American mom took her spoiled shopaholic teen to Indian slums to change her perspective about life. See part of "lucky ducks", the documentary here (her mom made this) through yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/video/world-15749633/curing-a-spoiled-rotten-teen-18988491

Thursday, March 25, 2010

See what Stroustroup has to say about C++ and grad students

Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup is the inventor of C++ programming language.

Read the full interview here :http://www.app2us.com/interviews/bjarne_stroustrup.htm.

Excerpts:

about applications that use C++

"
app2us: We understand that C++ is used in a wide variety of devices like cell phones, cameras and elevators. What is the most interesting device or application that uses C++?
Dr. Stroustrup: I'd say the Mars Rovers. Those are most interesting "gadgets". The Mars Rover project is one of the most impressive engineering feats to date and I'm proud that C++ is a prominent part of the systems involved; not just on the Rovers themselves, but also in the communications systems, testing, and image processing, and more. Obviously, more mundane applications, such as photoshop, the iPod GUI, and google's search engine, are more important in everyday life, but I find something like the Mars Rovers most inspiring. For a short list of applications, see http://www.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html

"

and tips about grad students

"

app2us: What is your advice to graduate students aspiring to pursue a career in research?
Dr. Stroustrup: Focus on problems. Don't get obsessed with tools and convention; instead learn about some yet unsolved real-world problems and build a research program around principled approaches to solving such problems. Don't get obsessed with having a solution tomorrow. Learn to communicate well. It does not matter how good your ideas are if you cannot explain them to others. You need to communicate well (both giving information and taking it) both verbally and in writing. For those of us who do not have English as our native language, it is essential to get a good grasp of both professional and colloquial English. One nice thing about that is that there is so much good literature that can be of help: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/literature.html
I find that CS grad students *always* underestimate the importance of colloquial English and writing. They consequently loose out on much that could have been a pleasure as well as of great utility.

"

Truly, thoughts of a great mind indeed!