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Monthly Archives October 2010

P, NP, and Goedel

Some time ago I had the “intuition” that there should be a connection between Kurt Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem and the P=? NP question. I never found the time to look at the literature on that, but eventually Suresh posted a short summary of a tutorial held at FOCS this year. It’s a nice, short, and [...]

Posted on 24 October 2010 † Matteo § English § Nerd § University ‡ Comments (0) °

In “praise” of Bickel and Doksum

The only class I am taking this semester (and the second-to-last before I am done with classes) is APMA 2670, Mathematical Statistics 1, an advanced graduate course on statistical inference. Among the suggested references for the course there is P.J. Beckel, K. A. Doksum, “Mathematical Statistics, Vol. I, 2nd Ed.” If you read the Amazon [...]

Posted on 21 October 2010 † Matteo § English § University ‡ Comments (1) °

“Take charge of your PhD project” ?

Rilancio un link segnalatomi da Anna, grad student ad Italian Studies qui a Brown: “Take charge of your PhD project!”. Personalmente la trovo fuffa, nel senso che se hai bisogno di un corso per imparare a gestire le relazioni con il tuo advisor, una persona che, in un modo o nell’altro, dovresti esserti scelto, allora [...]

Posted on 18 October 2010 † Matteo § Italiano § University ‡ Comments (0) °

Mandelbrot

Come certo saprete, è morto Mandelbrot, il “padre” dei frattali. Una citazione per tutte da “The Fractal Geometry of Nature”: “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” (non so se l’ultima sia davvero una “conseguenza” dei frattali, [...]

Posted on 18 October 2010 † Matteo § Italiano § University ‡ Comments (0) °

Elements of Ph.D., Volume 7

The “Standing on the shoulders of Giants”-method: “You should mine previous works as Dwarves mined Moria: deeper and deeper.” Tolkien’s advice (from the highly cited previous work “The Lord of the Rings”): “You should be wiser than the Dwarves and know when to stop. You do not want to wake up a Balrog, do you?” [...]

Posted on 17 October 2010 † Matteo § English § University ‡ Comments (0) °

Scanning film

I spent most of my day doing laundry and scanning film on my Epson V700. Some of the pictures are totally new for me: I shoot much more than I can print so I’ve never seen some of the pictures before, except enlarged with an 8x lupe from the negative or from the few contact [...]

Posted on 17 October 2010 † Matteo § English § Photos ‡ Comments (2) °

Verità

Normalmente non tengo file sul desktop del portatile. Dal 29 agosto, circa, fa invece capolino un file di testo dal nome verita.txt. Trovo oggi, dopo aver salutato un amico che è partito per l’Italia, aver corso 25 minuti (record!), e aver avuto un’idea per uno dei filoni della mia ricerca, trovo oggi il coraggio di [...]

Posted on 11 October 2010 † Matteo § Italiano § Personal ‡ Comments (24) °

Summing up

It’s almost midnight. Among the results I achieved today, I can enlist 5 pages of a proof for a very well known theorem, 1 corrected homework (as in “the work of 1 student”), 2 attended classes (for a total of 3 hours and 20 minutes). No jogging, sorry, and I feel guilty and lazy because [...]

Posted on 08 October 2010 † Matteo § English § Misc § University ‡ Comments (0) °