“The use of a program to prove the 4-color theorem will not change mathematics – it merely demonstrates that the theorem, a challenge for a century, is probably not important to mathematics.”~ From “Epigrams in Programming” by Alan J. Perlis It’s hard to agree or disagree with this quote. On one hand, results in mathematics [...]
Or: Calculus You Will Use Either Every Day or Never Approximating Constants We will be calculating Euler’s constant, e, by starting off close to the correct value, and then moving closer and closer until we get to the correct value. This is known as approximation. There are a few different ways to do this. A [...]
Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user. ~Niklaus Wirth, creator of Pascal. I couldn’t find a source for this, but I could [...]
