Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Problems with a Point: Exploring Math and Computer Science


As you can see from Lance's tweet


               Problems with a Point: Exploring Math and Computer Science
               by Gasarch and Kruskal

(ADDED LATER- the World scientific website has more info than amazon and has a table of contents, so here it is: here)

is now available! The tweet says its $68.00 but that's hardcover- paperback is $38.00 (are covers that expensive) and if you like your books already broken in, there are some used copies for $89.00. Makes sense to me (no it doesn't!). Could be the topic of a blog post (probably already was).

Okay, so whats in the book?  One of my favorite types of blog posts is when I make a point ABOUT math and then do some math to underscore that point.  I went through all of my blogs (all? No, I doubt I did that) and picked out blogs of that type. With Clyde's help we EXPANDED and POLISHED and GOT THE MATH RIGHT (in some cases I didn't have any math so we had to supply it).

When I first got a copy (about a month ago) I just couldn't stop reading it. I really like it! This is a non-trivial remark -- often authors get tired of their book, or after a while and wonder things like ``why did I write 300 page on the muffin problem? What was I thinking?'' So the fact that I am very pleased with it is not obvious. Does it mean you will?

If you ever thought `I wish bill would clean up his posts spelling and grammar AND expand on the math AND make it a more cohesive whole' then buy the book!

I will in future posts describe more about writing the book, but this is probably my last post where I plug the book.

bill g.

6 comments:

  1. Title sounds pretty interesting.
    Is there a "table of contents" available online that one can look at before buying?
    Thanks.

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    1. thanks for the heads up and the interest. I was surprised amazon didn't have a table of contents, but World Scientific(my publisher) does and I have added that link to the post.

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  2. >I wish bill would clean up his posts spelling and grammar AND expand no the math

    Did you intentionally make spelling and grammar mistakes here?

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    1. Alas, I wish I could say that I did. OH - I COULD say that but that would be lying. However, your comment made me reread and make corrections-I caught 4 typos. Normally I tell the reader of changes but time it seemed distracting, so I will just say in this comment that YES, the comment this is replying to WAS correct in its noticing that mistake, and inspired me to reread and fix others. Kudos!

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  3. >If you ever thought `I wish bill would clean up his posts spelling and grammar AND expand on the math AND make it a more cohesive whole' then buy the book!

    Good enough reason to make a purchase; in any case, sounds like good stuff that will keep my attention focused for the next weekend.

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  4. I read the book ("Printed as BoD"), it makes a light and inspiring reading as Ken Regan already observed. For ex-researchers some rusty math- and tcs-reminiscences are revived. Teachers will find a wealth of material to be used in class and puzzlers can update their stock of problems.
    For the second edition two corrections:
    Lemma 13.3 has b_n = 0 mod a, but according to Definition 13.4. it should be b_n-1.
    Lemma 21.1 (1) does probably need that a and b are mutually prime. A counterexample is (2) as sigma(2) = 3 and Sigma (4) = 7 != 9.

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