[Tutor] [OT] Calculus comic, was Re: Fwd: Finding the max value from a dictionary that does not exceed a variable's value.

[Peter Otten]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 01, 2016 at 12:00:47PM -0800, Danny Yoo wrote:
>> Here's a response I sent to Srinivas yesterday to further explain why
>> a balanced binary tree is probably overkill for the "largest
>> denomination" selection problem.  (I didn't realize that I had not
>> sent the following to the list.)
> [...]
>> So there are several crazy avenues we can take to over-optimize this
>> problem.  Just to make it clear: I think sticking to a simple linear
>> scan makes the most sense.  Everything else just seems to try to make
>> the problem harder than it deserves to be, akin to trying to take the
>> size of a rectangle via integration.
>> 
>> 
http://homepage.usask.ca/~blb230/Math_Comics/Calculus_Comic_files/image001.gif
> 
> I'm glad you've forwarded the message to the list, because I love that
> comic. The clever thing is that it actually gets the maths right too.
> Some of the notation is a bit strange compared to what I'm used to
> (I've never seen anyone use a bare integral sign before, with no
> integrand), 

That's not a bare integral sign, that's a vertical bar as in formula (12) of

http://www.mathe-online.at/mathint/int/i.html

The page is in German, sorry; the operator seems to be called "evaluated at" 
in English.

> and I think he skipped a line, but that's definitely one to
> keep.