Why hasn't anyone mentioned graph theory yet? I'm A CS major, math minor, and of all the math courses I've taken (Calc,2,3, Linear Algebra, graph theory, abstract algebra, probability theory), graph theory has definitely been the most useful in CS. Graph algorithms are a HUGE area of research, and come up in practice all the time. A good foundation in the thoery helps enormously.
Leahy's not nearly as bad as this makes him out to be. He's been a great senator for Vermont, and is generally fairly liberal. He's sponsored tons of bills that I love, inluding the PATRIOT Oversight Restoration Act. And I have to admit, the PIRATE act doesn't seem all that bad. It would simply allow civil prosecution, which makes sense in cases where criminal charges seem too harsh. And since the RIAA is filing civil charges anyway, I'd much rather have the Department of Justice investigating and charging than the RIAA.
I remember doing a graph theory problem set on a bus on my way back from a fencing tournament (I'm on my school's fencing team) -- one of my teammates looked over my shoulder and said something along the lines of "Your homework is drawing pictures? Can I take this class?" I told him sure, as long as you've satisfied the prereqs, which are multivariable calc, linear algebra, and discrete math (recommended). He was an economics major, so didn't end up taking it:-). I think I was in the process of drawing K_7 on a torus. Graph theory is such a great subject.
Mathematicians do it for the beauty. Society funds them because what is beautiful to a mathematician often turns out to be useful in many other ways. The NSF is paying me to do math research this summer, and honestly I don't care if what I'm doing has any relevance to anything -- I'm just doing it because what I'm studying is really cool and beautiful. But it may turn out that something I find is useful for something else that I never even thought of. This is what happened in large part with number theory -- many of the underlying results were discovered i nthe 1800's and early 1900's, and only later turned out to be useful in cryptography. You can't predict what will be useful and what won't.
I have never understood why all CS majors want to end up with programming jobs. CS is much more than software engineering, but I know exactly 2 other CS undergrads at my school that want to go into academia. Being a professor is a great job, and doing research in an area that you enjoy (for me, graph theory and combinatorial design theory) is fun and rewarding. And if you love to program, you can always do research into language design, software engineering, etc. Why go to Silicon Valley looking for a job which will drive you insane and burn you out by the time you're thirty when you can have fun doing original research and can't be fired thanks to tenure?
Read the article -- one of the cool things about this new theory is that we will be able to experimentally differentiate between it and the big bang theory within ten years or so.
And by the way, what evidence do you have that we won't ever know? Physics is still a very active field of research, and there's no reason to think that what we know now is all we will ever know.
I don't know about this -- I'm thinking of majoring in CS at a medium-sized eastern university, and am now taking an intro course. The professor is clearly biased against Microsoft, and gives all his examples using gcc and unix. Once you're past the intro course, almost everything is taught exclusively in unix according to some CS friends of mine. It's going to be fun, and any graduates are going to be at least as comfortable in solaris and red hat as they are in windows.
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Why hasn't anyone mentioned graph theory yet? I'm A CS major, math minor, and of all the math courses I've taken (Calc,2,3, Linear Algebra, graph theory, abstract algebra, probability theory), graph theory has definitely been the most useful in CS. Graph algorithms are a HUGE area of research, and come up in practice all the time. A good foundation in the thoery helps enormously.
Leahy's not nearly as bad as this makes him out to be. He's been a great senator for Vermont, and is generally fairly liberal. He's sponsored tons of bills that I love, inluding the PATRIOT Oversight Restoration Act. And I have to admit, the PIRATE act doesn't seem all that bad. It would simply allow civil prosecution, which makes sense in cases where criminal charges seem too harsh. And since the RIAA is filing civil charges anyway, I'd much rather have the Department of Justice investigating and charging than the RIAA.
I remember doing a graph theory problem set on a bus on my way back from a fencing tournament (I'm on my school's fencing team) -- one of my teammates looked over my shoulder and said something along the lines of "Your homework is drawing pictures? Can I take this class?" I told him sure, as long as you've satisfied the prereqs, which are multivariable calc, linear algebra, and discrete math (recommended). He was an economics major, so didn't end up taking it :-). I think I was in the process of drawing K_7 on a torus. Graph theory is such a great subject.
Mathematicians do it for the beauty. Society funds them because what is beautiful to a mathematician often turns out to be useful in many other ways. The NSF is paying me to do math research this summer, and honestly I don't care if what I'm doing has any relevance to anything -- I'm just doing it because what I'm studying is really cool and beautiful. But it may turn out that something I find is useful for something else that I never even thought of. This is what happened in large part with number theory -- many of the underlying results were discovered i nthe 1800's and early 1900's, and only later turned out to be useful in cryptography. You can't predict what will be useful and what won't.
I have never understood why all CS majors want to end up with programming jobs. CS is much more than software engineering, but I know exactly 2 other CS undergrads at my school that want to go into academia. Being a professor is a great job, and doing research in an area that you enjoy (for me, graph theory and combinatorial design theory) is fun and rewarding. And if you love to program, you can always do research into language design, software engineering, etc. Why go to Silicon Valley looking for a job which will drive you insane and burn you out by the time you're thirty when you can have fun doing original research and can't be fired thanks to tenure?
And by the way, what evidence do you have that we won't ever know? Physics is still a very active field of research, and there's no reason to think that what we know now is all we will ever know.
I don't know about this -- I'm thinking of majoring in CS at a medium-sized eastern university, and am now taking an intro course. The professor is clearly biased against Microsoft, and gives all his examples using gcc and unix. Once you're past the intro course, almost everything is taught exclusively in unix according to some CS friends of mine. It's going to be fun, and any graduates are going to be at least as comfortable in solaris and red hat as they are in windows.