Progress Report
I said I was taking a break to study the material I need to know to implement a CAS, and I’ve been doing so. But.. that’s not so interesting yet; I’m going very slow, as I don’t feel there is much point to rushing– I’m in this for the long haul anyway.
I’ve been reading Crytonomicon by Stephen Nealson; Alan Turing plays a role in that book, so today when I visited the library, I picked up a biography of him. Actually, there’s more to it– I see that book so often, yet this is the first time I’ve checked it out– I picked it up today because of the Cryptonomicon, and I started to read the introduction, which gave me the impression that it was a book that Douglas Hofstadter would read. Then it turned out that Douglas Hostadter wrote the introduction! That marvelous stroke of serendipity made me decide to read the book.
On the math side: I love this book I’m currently reading on algebra: “Advanced Modern Algebra” by Joseph Rotman. And I have two excellent CA specific reference books, and one for polynomials: “Algorithms for Computer Algebra” by Geddes, Czapor and Labahn, and “Modern Computer Algebra” by von zur Gathen and Gerhard, and “Polynomials: an Algorithmic Approach” by Mignotte and Stefanescu, respectively. So once I finally finish learning ‘ordinary’ algebra, I can start tackling the applied, algorithmic side.
I’ve also been fooling around with Scheme. Nothing major, just implementing some simple number theoretic algorithms (gcd, lcm, factoring, totient function). This is helping me get familiar with Scheme– even in implementing these unremarkable procedures, I’m seeing how divergent the different Scheme implementations all are.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Crazy publishers (12/21/2005)
- Progress in Computer Algebra (3/19/2004)
- Current Vistas (2/12/2004)