geometry – Page 46 – neverendingbooks

nostalgia

Published May 4, 2005 by lieven

Unlike the
cooler people out there, I haven’t received my
_pre-ordered_ copy (via AppleStore) of Tiger yet. Partly my own fault
because I couldn’t resist the temptation to bundle up with a
personalized iPod Photo!
The good news is that it buys me more time to follow the
housecleaning tips. First, my idea was to make a CarbonCopyClooner–
image of my iBook and put it on the _iMac_ upstairs which I
rarely use these days, do a clean
Tiger install on the iBook and gradually copy over the essential
programs and files I need (and only those!). But reading the
macdev-article, I think it is better to keep my iBook running Panther
and experiment with Tiger on the redundant iMac. (Btw. unless you want
to have a copy of my Mac-installation there will be hardly a point
checking this blog the next couple of weeks as I intend to write down
all details of the Panther/Tiger switch here.)

Last week-end I
started a _Paper-rescue_ operation, that is, to find among the
multiple copies of books/papers/courses, the ones that contain all the
required material to re-TeX them and unfortunately my _archive_
is in a bad state. There is hardly a source-file left of a paper prior
to 1999 when I started putting all my papers on the arXiv.

On the other hand, I do
have saved most of my undergraduate courses. Most of them were still
using postscript-crap like _epsfig_ etc. so I had to convert all
the graphics to PDFs (merely using Preview ) and
modify the epsfig-command to _includegraphics_. So far, I
converted all my undergraduate _differential geometry_ courses
from 1998 to this year and made them available in a uniform
screen-friendly viewing format at TheLibrary/undergraduate.

There are two
ways to read the changes in these courses over the years. (1) as a shift
from _differential_ geometry to more _algebraic_ geometry
and (2) as a shift towards realism wrt.the level of our undegraduate
students. In 1998 I was still thinking
that I could teach them an easy way into Connes non-commutative standard
model but didn’t go further than the Lie group sections (maybe one day
I’ll rewrite this course as a graduate course when I ever get
reinterested in the Connes’ approach). In 1999 I had the illusion that
it might be a good idea to introduce manifolds-by-examples coming from
operads! In 2000 I gave in to the fact
that most of the students which had to follow this course were applied
mathematicians so perhaps it was a good idea to introduce them to
dynamical systems (quod non!). The 2001 course is probably the
most realistic one while still doing standard differential geometry. In
2002 I used the conifold
singularity and conifold transitions (deformations and blow-ups) as
motivation but it was clear that the students did have difficulties with
the blow-up part as they didn’t have enough experience in
_algebraic_ geometry. So the last two years I’m giving an
introduction to algebraic geometry culminating in blow-ups and some
non-commutative geometry.

markdown2use

Published April 19, 2005 by lieven

Here some
possible uses of Markdown and the
HumaneText Service.
As an example, let us take the
noncommutative geometry & algebra page maintained by Paul Smith.

If you copy the source of this page to BBEdit and use the
html2txt.py script in the #! menu (see
this post)
you get a nicely readable Markdown-file which strips the page of all its
layout and which is easy to modify, for example to include author and
URL at the start, remove some additional empty lines, make relative URLs
absolute and so on.

Applying the Markdown.pl
script to it one gets a nice RetroCool version
of the page. For starters, this gives a way to make your own collection
of websites you like in a uniform layout (of course, later on you can
add your own CSS to them).

More important is that the
Markdown-version (see here for
the text-file) is extremely readable and allows to _mine_ all
links easily (as you can see all links contained in the HTML-page are
referenced together at the end of the file). So, this is a quick way to
collect homepage- and email-links from link-pages.

Btw. there
are different ways to include links in a markdown text, for example I
like to write it immediately after the reference, so doing a Markdown.pl
followed by a html2txt.py doesn’t have to reproduce your original file
and fortunately you will always end up with a file having all links
referenced at the end. So, this procedure allows you to have uniformity
in a collection of markdown-files.

Equally important for me (for
later use in an intelligent database using DevonThink ) is that the Markdown file is the best way to safe the
HTML file in the database (as a RTF file) while maintaining readability
(which is important when DevonThink returns snippets of
information).

GMD

Published April 14, 2005 by lieven

I’m always
extremely slow to pick up a trend (let alone a hype), in mathematics as
well as in real life. It took me over a year to know of the existence of
_blogs_ and to realize that they were a much easier way to
maintain a webpage than manually modifying HTML-pages. But, eventually I
sometimes get there, usually with the help of the mac-dev-center. So, once again,
I read their gettings things done with your mac article long after it was
posted and completely unaware of the Getting Things Done (or GTD) hype.

At first, it just
sounds as one of those boring managament-nonsense-peptalk things (and
probably that is precisely what it generically is). Or what do you think
about the following resume from Getting
started with ‘Getting things done’ :

identify all the
stuff in your life that isn√ït in the right place (close all open
loops)
get rid of the stuff that isn√ït yours or you don√ït
need right now
create a right place that you trust and that
supports your working style and values
put your stuff in the
right place, consistently
do your stuff in a way that honors
your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
iterate and refactor mercilessly

But in fact there is
also some interesting material around at the 43 folders website which bring this
management-talk closer to home such as the How does a
nerd hack GTD? post.

Also of interest are his findings after
a year working with the GTD setup. These are contained in three posts :
A Year
of Getting Things Done: Part 1, The Good Stuff, followed by A Year of
Getting Things Done: Part 2, The Stuff I Wish I Were Better At to
end with A Year of
Getting Things Done: Part 3, The Future of GTD?. If these three
postings don’t get you intrigued, nothing else will.

So, is
there something like _GMD : Getting Mathematics Done_? Clearly, I
don’t mean getting theorems proved, that’s a thing of a few seconds of
inspiration and months to fill in the gaps. But, perhaps all this GTD
and the software mentioned can be of some help to manage the
everyday-workflow of mathematicians, such as checking the arXiv and the
web, maintaining an email-, pdf- and BiBTeX-database, drafting papers,
books and courses etc.

In the next few weeks I’ll try out some
of the tricks. Probably another way to state this is the question “which
Apps will survive Tiger?” Now that it is official that Tiger (that is, Mac
10.4 to non-apple eaters) will be released by the end of the month it is
time to rethink which of the tools I really like to keep and which is
just useless garbage I picked up along the road. For example, around
this time last year I had a Perl
phase and bought half a meter or so of O’Reilly Perl-books. And yes
I did write a few simple scripts, some useful such as my own arXiv RSS-feeds,
some not so useful as a web-spider I wrote to check on changes in the
list of hamepages of people working in non-commutative algebra and
geometry. A year later I realize I’ll never become a Perl Monk. So from now on I want to
make my computer-life as useful and easy as possible, relying on wizards
to provide me with cool software to use and help me enjoy mathematics
even more. I’ll keep you posted how my GMD-adventure goes.

Tag: geometry

nostalgia

markdown2use

GMD