Ramble - was RE: [Edu-sig] Long Integer Fractions

[Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)]

Dennis E. Hamilton mentioned Knuth's work on concrete mathematics, and Tim
Peters enlarged:
> "Concrete Mathematics", by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik.  A *much* better
> choice than Knuth Vol 1:  CM was written because Vol 1 proved too
> telegraphic and intense for most students to master.  CM pays much more
> attention to motivation, skips the highly esoteric results, and fills in
> some of the many gaps in Vol 1.

I bought it some while back, and its on my list of "projects for when I have
lots of time" [1] - it definitely looks like something an ordinary person
might have a chance with, whereas Knuth's "master tomes" are definitely
not[2] - I've always found them irritating because they often address a
problem domain I'm interested in, but I want an *answer*, not some Mixin
code I have to back-translate into a real language (with the potential
errors inherent in such a process), and then worry about not having
understood the maths that went with it - and anyway the actual answer I want
(in all such books) is often the result of one of the excercises. Humph
(wanders off grumbling to himself).

There is a serious point buried at the end there, though. The "useful" books
we're sometimes referred to for algorithms, etc., are too often academically
inclined - that is, they're aimed at education courses, rather than at
people seeking immediate gratification(!). With infinite leisure time,
that's no problem, but if you're trying to find an answer because you need
to use it, finding that the book leads almost all the way and leaves the
rest to be solved in an excercise is, shall we say, frustrating. Not the
author's fault if a book doesn't match one's expectations, of course, but an
irritation nonetheless.

Is that last of relevance to the SIG? I feel somehow it should be (oddities
of maths curricula won't start to be of great direct interest to me until
our older son starts school later this year, and even then the system in the
US is only likely to be of marginal interest...)

Ah - I knew there was something I actually wanted to say that WAS of
relevance:

Please, whatever country you're from (I'll include mine as well!) can you
remember that year NAMES for students don't mean anything outside your
country? Things like "first grade" or "freshman", or even terms like "high
school" or "college", don't mean anything outwith the national context.
Saying what AGE you're talking about is a lot more useful (although even
then it's not necessarily too much help - my son will start formal school at
age 4, but I believe in Germany it wouldn't be until age 7, so talking about
requirements for a 5 year old might be odd).

Tibs

[1] This is currently scheduled to be in about 18 years time, I think, given
the children's ages (I'm an optimist!) along with learning to do kumihimo
(braid) weaving, getting round to making a fairing for the recumbent trike,
and all those esoteric Python things I never have time for. Hopefully more
mundane projects like updating our web pages, finishing the mxTextTools meta
language, writing a parser using it for the BikeCode, finalising the Joan
Aiken bibliography, etc., will happen rather sooner. Hah.

[2] The TeX book, on the other hand, is fun! (hmm - "The TeX book" is
ambiguous - thinking about it, I mean both the book about TeX, and also the
printed version of the tangled source code (or whatever the term is))

--
Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)      http://www.tibsnjoan.demon.co.uk/
"Bounce with the bunny, strut with the duck
 Spin with the chickens now - CLUCK CLUCK CLUCK!"
Sandra Boynton, Barnyard Dance!
My views! Mine! Mine! (Unless Laser-Scan ask nicely to borrow them.)