So, as the title of the post suggests I am gonna give words to the Wanderlust that I have about various aspects of computing and, more importantly still, which areas are the most relevant ones to what I intend to do i.e. thinking Mathematically and solving problems.
In the previous posts I have of course, talked about various things that I am doing to improve my programming skills and to, just you know, understand what is important to me and how can I use purposefully to achieve my goals.
Now, at the fist glance text processing( via programming languages or editors) might not seem to be exactly related to Mathematics but when we dig deeper, no, rather dive deeper then we find these are all inter-related. Take any single Mathematical problem for example, concerning any branch and we find that there are easy pre-built commands in SageMaths to do that for us. But what if we want to store our work simultaneously at a different place in, say text file and we want it to be able to have chinese characters (or any unicode characters) as well. Then we need to be able to manipulate that text file.
That is where the knowledge of Python language comes in!!
Sage, is a mathematical software and it's objective is to provide us with a complete solution to solving Mathematical problems, not so much the computer administration tasks or say doing file manipulation for us. That's the realm of text processing, for which I would much rather prefer to use easiest ways.
OR let us take another example still.
Say, we need to take in data from a particular web-site and then do statistical analysis on that data. The data-fetching part of the equation is of course related only to programming languages and the latter much more Mathematically focused part is the job for Sage. How are we to combine these two processes. Well, for one thing you can use Anaconda to come up with the solution for data-fetching and then you can save it all up in a text file and then you can use Sage to operate upon that data.
Text processing is central to my needs, I mean, just think about it, computers still aren't as adept at understanding spoken language and even less so at obtaining patters from images on their own. That requires and overwhelming ability of a Human brain. Think, a chef and a mixer and you get the idea.
But what computers are really amazing at is speed of doing things which they have evolved doing, which is textual data.
So, I have been exploring many python libraries and trying to figure out the inner workings of each one. Now I am more comfortable with many of them for example - The standard library, MatplotLib and SymPy et cetera but there are even more of them which I find to be useful.
I have used Beautiful Soup and Requests as well in order to get my feet wet in dealing with data-fetching and in the process I have improved my understanding of Web-pages and how the entire things works. Not that I am an expert by any means but I need to have Targets which combine many of my goals together in a coherent system.
When I think about it, it has always been so!!
I never really felt like competing in programming challenges that happen all over the internet. Why?
The simple reason being, it never made sense for me to solve problems just for the hell of it or say improving my skill in a particular programming language. I had no need of programming at that time.
But I always was interested in Mathematics and Physics so when I came across SageMaths and when I felt that I am relatively free from any workload from University, I decided to dive right in. I think that it can be summarized in the following way, I never really thought that solving Cormen et al - Algorithms book would be of any practical value to me. However, when I think about solving Higher Mathematical problems then, and only then, it makes sense for me to become a better programmer.
Same is true for every other skill like LaTex or Emacs. I need to know why I am supposed to master something, I need to know the purpose of investing my time into something.
Becoming a good programmer and getting a "good job" is not really my thing. I am much more interested in using computers as Problem Solving Tools, in ways that interest me, intrigue me to no end. Having a go at Mathematical Olympiads would make sense (after a while;P ) but right now I need to be able to use the SageMaths tools well enough.
I know it's a bit dis-joint at the moment still but it's all making sense now.
I have always been this way you know, I need to see the big picture, to be able to paint every corner with all my heart and finesse.
Why do I wish to improve Mathematics?
You ever look up at the stars any more! I do, everyday. They are the one thing that fascinates me to no end, it's like a dance of galaxies and at other times it all seems like a painting. Physics is the reason, I find immense beauty and satisfaction in the fact that this Cosmic Dance can be understood by such a tiny mind as ours. This feeling, for me, is profound. And to this end I wish to do Mathematics.
So, you see! It's a great chain which is tightly linked to every other portion of the chain.
Being able to use computers in ways which are relevant to my goals is the only reason why I would ever really invest my time in doing something.
Mathematicians of this century must be able to program and must be proficient at computers if they are to use this Magic wand to make the chores vanish.
In the previous posts I have of course, talked about various things that I am doing to improve my programming skills and to, just you know, understand what is important to me and how can I use purposefully to achieve my goals.
Now, at the fist glance text processing( via programming languages or editors) might not seem to be exactly related to Mathematics but when we dig deeper, no, rather dive deeper then we find these are all inter-related. Take any single Mathematical problem for example, concerning any branch and we find that there are easy pre-built commands in SageMaths to do that for us. But what if we want to store our work simultaneously at a different place in, say text file and we want it to be able to have chinese characters (or any unicode characters) as well. Then we need to be able to manipulate that text file.
That is where the knowledge of Python language comes in!!
Sage, is a mathematical software and it's objective is to provide us with a complete solution to solving Mathematical problems, not so much the computer administration tasks or say doing file manipulation for us. That's the realm of text processing, for which I would much rather prefer to use easiest ways.
OR let us take another example still.
Say, we need to take in data from a particular web-site and then do statistical analysis on that data. The data-fetching part of the equation is of course related only to programming languages and the latter much more Mathematically focused part is the job for Sage. How are we to combine these two processes. Well, for one thing you can use Anaconda to come up with the solution for data-fetching and then you can save it all up in a text file and then you can use Sage to operate upon that data.
Text processing is central to my needs, I mean, just think about it, computers still aren't as adept at understanding spoken language and even less so at obtaining patters from images on their own. That requires and overwhelming ability of a Human brain. Think, a chef and a mixer and you get the idea.
But what computers are really amazing at is speed of doing things which they have evolved doing, which is textual data.
So, I have been exploring many python libraries and trying to figure out the inner workings of each one. Now I am more comfortable with many of them for example - The standard library, MatplotLib and SymPy et cetera but there are even more of them which I find to be useful.
I have used Beautiful Soup and Requests as well in order to get my feet wet in dealing with data-fetching and in the process I have improved my understanding of Web-pages and how the entire things works. Not that I am an expert by any means but I need to have Targets which combine many of my goals together in a coherent system.
When I think about it, it has always been so!!
I never really felt like competing in programming challenges that happen all over the internet. Why?
The simple reason being, it never made sense for me to solve problems just for the hell of it or say improving my skill in a particular programming language. I had no need of programming at that time.
But I always was interested in Mathematics and Physics so when I came across SageMaths and when I felt that I am relatively free from any workload from University, I decided to dive right in. I think that it can be summarized in the following way, I never really thought that solving Cormen et al - Algorithms book would be of any practical value to me. However, when I think about solving Higher Mathematical problems then, and only then, it makes sense for me to become a better programmer.
Same is true for every other skill like LaTex or Emacs. I need to know why I am supposed to master something, I need to know the purpose of investing my time into something.
Becoming a good programmer and getting a "good job" is not really my thing. I am much more interested in using computers as Problem Solving Tools, in ways that interest me, intrigue me to no end. Having a go at Mathematical Olympiads would make sense (after a while;P ) but right now I need to be able to use the SageMaths tools well enough.
I know it's a bit dis-joint at the moment still but it's all making sense now.
I have always been this way you know, I need to see the big picture, to be able to paint every corner with all my heart and finesse.
Why do I wish to improve Mathematics?
You ever look up at the stars any more! I do, everyday. They are the one thing that fascinates me to no end, it's like a dance of galaxies and at other times it all seems like a painting. Physics is the reason, I find immense beauty and satisfaction in the fact that this Cosmic Dance can be understood by such a tiny mind as ours. This feeling, for me, is profound. And to this end I wish to do Mathematics.
So, you see! It's a great chain which is tightly linked to every other portion of the chain.
Being able to use computers in ways which are relevant to my goals is the only reason why I would ever really invest my time in doing something.
Mathematicians of this century must be able to program and must be proficient at computers if they are to use this Magic wand to make the chores vanish.
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