Absolutely. Problem is that a few of them are simply excellent books, like Rudin's Fourier analysis, or Kobayashi-Nomizu, so it's hard to resist buying them.
So, where are the students supposed to leaf through the books and run into them by accident or semi-accident by going after the subject classification or whatever system they used to have?
At least for me when I need to know something immediately, then immediately means immediately. Waiting 20 minutes is a torture when you know exactly where to look.
Some older Journal issues aren't kept there. By Murphy's law you always need an article from the last volume that isn't available electronically and not in the math library.
@robjohn Everything above 10 is more luck than merit. Here certainly the repeated bumping of the thread over a few hours (so that it got back to the top again) helped, then the result is somewhat unexpected (that (1+x^a) should contribute something, right?) and then it's easy to understand after all. Another effect at work here is that as soon as an answer got some momentum people don't bother to look at the other answers (if it's got more than 10 votes then it must be pretty good, right?).
So I guess that's why Sasha's answer got more and more votes, while yours and Sivaram's answers were sort of neglected.
@tb and the "Google bubble effect" plays a part, because the answer with the highest number of votes rises to the top and so it is the first one people see.
I had a similar effect with my answer here where the vote count leveled out only over time. (I couldn't believe that people invoke Picard for such a thing)
I see that Didier referenced an answer of his to a previous problem that is pretty much a duplicate. Why did they both break the integral at 1? It's not necessary.
@robjohn You either have to know where it is (change /question/12345/ in to /post/12345/timeline) or you have to install the SE modifications that gives you two additional links (timeline and history) next to link/edit/flag/close links
@robjohn It amounts to the same, doesn't it? You do the integral twice and exploit the symmetry x -> 1/x, they divide the integral in two pieces and exploit the symmetry on one piece only.
Can somebody tell what is being asked here? It looks like OP is after a "closed form expression" or an expression in terms of special functions, but I'm not entirely sure.
@Srivatsan I like your hint for (2) in the answer you just wrote, but wouldn't it be nicer to suggest drawing the graphs and imagine them as staircases seen from below, and writing down the lower left corners. This corresponds to (some) finite subsets of N x N.
One second. Parsing what you wrote. In general, for the other parts, I am trying to convert all the symbols and equations to words to play up the intuition and play down the full solution. I haven't decided what to do with part (2)
@tb You should also specify the value of the function at that subset, no?
Wait, sorry, I missed something. What's the second N in N x N? Oh, cool. That's a nice idea.
@Srivatsan That's taken care of if I'm saying I'm noting the lower left corners of the stairs. From each point in my finite subset of N x N I draw a vertical line and a horizontal line.
I left a coffee shop because they close at 10. I thought of going to another down the road which would've taken 5-10 mins. But then I decided to take the bus and come back to the one closer to my home. That way, I need not wait for a bus at 12.
In fact, I am quite surprised I am back so quickly. =)
Probably I'm afraid because I never liked hearing: "I can't really tell you much about it because you probably don't have the prerequisites, but I can't resist anyway".
@Srivatsan I have no opinion. I just looked at the commutative algebra notes cursorily and the references were completely off, so I gave up pretty quickly.
@Srivatsan Well, a good question deserves at least an attempt at a good answer :)
But do you guys also have so many captcha's recently? it's terribly annoying about every third answer I want to post I have to go through that. Did they change the algorithm?
@JM I think there was some 30 mins threshold (at least on MO). I often start writing an answer and let it rest for a while, continue a little bit, and so on. Maybe it's because of that. But I did that all the time, but it's only starting to backfire now.
@JM He left before I joined the site. I've seen a few very nice answers of his, but I also read the whole return key incident/melodrama. I understand the annoyance very well. On the other hand, to produce such an uproar seems a bit exaggerated.
Yeah, somehow I now feel he merely joined the election out of spite...
@QED Depends. If pressing the button causes everything to re-render, it'd be nasty. Now if there was a way to localize the effect to a single line, then we're in business.
I can't judge the content of the question, but I'm getting increasingly disgruntled by the purist and narrow-minded attitude of some of the most vocal MO members. I fear that if they continue this way they will never reach a reasonable coverage of all parts of mathematics
I remember something annoying once. There was this guy who was asking about Moore-Penrose pseudoinverses in MO many months ago. There was a quick comment on a vote to close dismissing the problem as trivial.
I was so annoyed I dumped a bunch of papers written on the stuff in the comments, to show that the problem wasn't as trivial as the guy thought.
The only thing I can do is keep my eyes open and when new questions with this tag appear, retag them correctly (and perhaps give there link to discussion on meta, so that OP knows the reason.)
Honestly, I was surprised by that. (I certainly would not upvote that suggestion - I've just posted the suggestion from the comments so that it can be up and downvoted, but this was not the result I expected.)
@JM You mean the multivariable stuff? Like partial derivatives?
@Daniil Lokomotiv is going to the Play-off phase of Europa league. (I happen to know since one player from Slovakia is in that team. But maybe you're not football fan...)
@robjohn I did not know that is something like this in FF.
After recent binomial coefficient incident, don't you have the feeling that sometimes we are too hasty in closing questions? (Of course, this was definitely not the case.)
For example I've had funny feelings about closing this one: math.stackexchange.com/questions/87143/… since the answer has to be combined from the answer from the questions marked as duplicates.
