by danielfalbo
2 subcomments
- Context:
Thomson Leighton is the founder of Akamai
Lectures here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7540DEDD482705B
One of the set of lectures on the internet I loved the most.
- I really love this book, it is hard af but I still can understand 1-2 pages of each paragraph. I have received some great insights, like the function is the endless lists of inputs and outputs, and some really great humour, such as all is not lost in mathematical notation. I really wish I can understand this book completely before I die.
- Each section is quite standard in presentation which isn't a bad thing.
I love that each citation has back references to _all_ the places that it is cited from.
I wish more books did this.
by october8140
8 subcomments
- I always see lists of like 100 MUST HAVE books for Computer Science. Is there like a top 5 must have books for Computer Science?
by sbondaryev
1 subcomments
- I like this book. The probability section is great, especially how they handle the Monty Hall paradox. They use "four step method" that breaks it down perfectly - way clearer than the explanations you get in movies like 21 or numb3rs.
- I took a look at the table of contents and found that the second chapter is about the well-ordering principle. That’s surprising to me because I’ve only heard of the well-ordering theorem by Zermelo, which is a fundamental theorem in set theory, stating that any set has a well-ordering assuming the axiom of choice. It’s amazing and mind-bending in its own right (imagine a well-ordering for reals), but is clearly not very relevant to computer science.
I find the well-ordering principle slightly bewildering. It seems to presuppose the existence of an ordering on natural numbers and then prove this principle. But I’ve never been taught things this way; you always construct the natural numbers from Peano and define the ordering first, then you can actually prove the well-ordering principle rather than leaving it as an axiom.
- re: Chapter 15.8 on the so-called pigeonhole principle
Following Dijkstra’s EWD1094, here’s a way to solve the hairs-on-heads problem eschewing the language of pigeonholes and employing the fact that the mean is at most the maximum of a non-empty bag of numbers.
We are given that Boston has 500,000 non-bald people. The human head has at most 200,000 hairs. Show that there must be at least 3 people in Boston who have the same number of hairs on their head.
Each non-bald Bostonian must have a hair count between 1 and 200,000. The average number of such people per hair count is 500,000 / 200,000 = 2.5. The maximum is at least that; moreover, it must be a round number. So the maximum >= 3. QED.
by PanoptesYC
5 subcomments
- I've not worked through a large book of problems like this before. At risk of sounding silly, are there solutions to the sample problems? I've given a few a go but can't find the answers anywhere to check my work.
- This is a very valuable resource for me. Thanks for posting!
by endymion-light
1 subcomments
- This is why I love Hackernews - I've literally been looking for this recently and now I get it as a full PDF.
Does anyone have recommendations for better screen readers?
by einpoklum
1 subcomments
- I'm not such a fan of trying to cram everything-mathematically-relevant into a single huge book (and it is huge - 1048 pages).
Anyway, this reminds me of a rather different initiative in the same vein: The building of Mathematical principles based on the expediences of Computer Science: CONCRETE MATHEMATICS
by Donald Knuth, Ronald Graham and Oren Patashnik.
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/gkp.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Mathematics
available on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/download/concrete-mathematics/Concrete%2...
- It did not see the proof of the correctness of circular buffers? one consumer, one producer, parallel execution, 2 atomic pointers, one read pointer, one write pointer and the cycle bits.
- [dead]
by MathNeville
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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