That's a disadvantage of harmonic analysis. There is hardly any need for that in the industry (or none, maybe basic stuff about signal analysis...). I just picked it because it was the most fun, not because it gave me the best opportunities. I will figure out in a couple of years if that was a bad choice. :).

@JonasTeuwen More applied even than that, I think. My adviser worked on massively large-scale logistics problems in the transportation industry. Say you have a large package delivery company that has to deliver thousands of packages every day all over a country the size of the U.S. How do you assign packages and drivers to trucks to minimize costs/minimize average time to delivery/maximize profit?

The problem is too large to be solved to optimality, so how can we design very good approximately optimal solutions? Those are the kinds of problems he worked on back then.

Oh, right, I've heard about those problems. So useful... :).

If you're really interested, you can find out more from his web site.

@JonasTeuwen This is how my friend described some other guy: "Well, he is smart enough to do theory, but not smart enough to know he shouldn't have chosen it in the first place." =)

Haha :D.

@Jonas: My adviser also probably wouldn't call himself a mathematician. What he does is definitely OR, but it's probably more engineering than mathematics.

Applied mathematics is also mathematics, I suppose.

@Jonas Oh, well, to give you context about my comment, there the question wasn't theory vs. applied math, but it was theoretical CS vs. non-theoretical CS (e.g., systems). The person who commented does systems; I assume he was just being modest (in a weird way).

But it sure is applicable in the case of mathematics as well, I think.

I think now the frontier between pure and applied maths are quite vague

@MikeSpivey OR? My advisor is XOR!!

@Asaf: So you're like my X-rated twin?

Well, that depends what do you mean by OR.

Overrated?

Plan to conquer world: progressing smoothly

@AsafKaragila operations research, I think

@HenningMakholm Congrats.

@HenningMakholm Congrats on joining the front page. I imagine you'll pass me in about, oh, two weeks or so. :)

I thought that OR meant a logical operation.

@AsafKaragila Sometimes it's not very logical.

@HenningMakholm Congrats, Henning!

@MikeSpivey Even if you stop posting completely, mid-December at the earliest, based on past performance...

@Mike: Spock will be rolling in his grave in several centuries.

@AsafKaragila Does he do Israeli mind melds, too? :)-

No... Israelis are rarely logical.

Most humans are.

Say, Mike, how do you guys feel about sites like ratemyprofessor and stuff like that?

Do you check it often?

Or do you not care about it whatsoever?

@HenningMakholm Seriously - according to your user page you've been on this site for two months, and you're already over 10K. When I started on the site there was nobody over 10K, and so I can safely say that you are the fastest person to reach that mark in the existence of math.SE.

Hmm, someone writes: "I hate Mike Spivey" on ratemyprofessor because he got a C-. Funny.

@AsafKaragila The last time I checked it was 2004, I think. And it had exactly the kinds of things I expected: The comments were mostly polarized between students who loved me and students who hated me. RMP suffers from response bias: The students who care the most are the ones who are going to respond. You don't get an accurate representation of the entire set of students who take your classes.

I do read my course evaluations each semester carefully, looking for trends.

@JonasTeuwen Not surprising.

@MikeSpivey But what does that teach us? Probably only that of all the members who could do that, I'm the only one with bad enough self-discipline to keep at it rather than doing something actually productive.

@Mike: not to diminish the impressive achievement of emperor-of-the-world-to-be Henning, but it's more like 3 months. He joined on 8th of August. (if you hover your mouse over 2 months a tool tip appears with the exact date of registration).

@HenningMakholm I make no interpretations as to what it means. :)

@tb Thanks for the clarification. I think my observation about fastest time to 10K still holds. Although you were pretty fast, too, t.b.

I guess someone with some basic SQL knowledge can whip up a quick query about who took the least time to reach 10k, of course Henning's timing will be only verified after the next SQL dump...

Actually, if Henning's time here is closer to three months, Qiaochu might have beat him. Or joriki.

@Mike: Thanks, I think I was beaten by joriki, André and Didier (but who takes offense to be beaten by those guys :)), at least in the long run. There has been an incredible inflation both of rating and questions. When I joined the site early this year I needed approximately 3k to be on the front page.

That is also true. It was harder to gain reputation back at the day.

And there were far less questions a day.

I'm not sure why the system thinks I registered on August 8. My first surviving post was on August 30.

@HenningMakholm You registered but didn't participate? I was like that for some time... (Still 22 days is a long gap.)

@AsafKaragila I love reading contradictory evaluations from the same class. :)

@Asaf: Do you ever get students commenting on your appearance? A couple of years ago one of my students said I needed to buy some new shoes. And earlier this week, when I was reading over the evals of a colleague who is being evaluated this year, I noticed that one of his students told him to buy some Dockers because cargo pants are so last year.

ROFL

@Srivatsan Apparently so. I spent most of August mining rep at SO. That got really tedious after a while, though.

Nah, I walk around barefoot during the hotter season, and I wear Redback during the colder seasons.

@MikeSpivey =)

Also, ugh! Magidor's handwriting is impossible to understand... I should get back those 10 points he deducted from my work in that course if I can understand what are his remarks!

Magidor sounds like someone from Lord of The Rings.

Magidor -- the magus who gave gold?

@JonasTeuwen I don't remember him )

@AsafKaragila I wear Birkenstocks all the time. Apparently the student thought I needed to buy some fancier shoes.

Heh, I like walking barefoot.

@AsafKaragila Long back, I had a physics prof. who wrote the number 2, the symbol \partial and \theta in the same way. Thankfully, he soon switched to slides.

:-D

@Asaf: I'm sure that star came from Henning :D

Someone did their research, I see.

@tb How did you make the guess?

Because Henning likes to walke barefoot as well.

Is that so?

@Srivatsan: No guess, really. Go to his home page and look under peculiarities.

He said so in the past.

Or maybe I have read that on his website, that is a possibility as well.

Here???

Must be the website then.

But I'm vastly more impressed by a guy doing that in Denmark than by someone doing this in Israel.

Didn't know about this. Must thank Henning for the info...

@tb True.

I am also not a "true barefooter", I just like to teach barefoot and to walk around the university barefoot. Not always though.

@Srivatsan Except in August, it is nearly impossible to walk barefoot.

Plus you're bearded.

Which of us?

This barefoot idea is confusingly refreshing to me.

Could be plural "you".

Have you faced anything like stores not permitting bare feet?

I remember that my university shuttle didn't permit a guy barefoot. He had a pair of slippers handy inside his bag. (To be frank, I did look at him curiously, to put it mildly.)

@Srivatsan In Denmark, only the Tivoli Gardens and the Museum of Natural History at Hillerød. Nothing like the supermarket/library/courthouse problems the American SBL members face.

These are the places that require you to wear shoes?

There was a bus driver or two in Edinburgh who refused to let me on, and the cantina attendants at Heriot-Watt, and an EasyJet cabin crew. (I've been flying full-service airlines since then; no problems there).

@Srivatsan Yes

@HenningMakholm Wonder what Mike's students would say if he walks in barefeet to class. =)

What on earth could be a reason not to let somebody ride on a bus barefeet?

@tb A bomb strapped onto his chest.

@tb Well, the incident I quoted was also similar, right? It was a bus, essentially.

@tb My assumption is that they were worried that I will hold the bus company liable if I was injured by sharp items on the floor or something like that.

Not that this makes much sense -- if I were to sue, then why not do it because I cut my feet because I had to walk home because I was rejected by the bus driver?

I can understand court rooms or upper class restaurants to some extent, but buses, that eludes me.

@tb Why court rooms? Since the shoe is a part of the dress code?

One of the two times it happened I was on my way to a conference dinner together with my PI. I had slippers with me, but the PI got mad and said we'd wait for the next bus instead ...

@HenningMakholm I don't get it. What difference does taking the next bus make?

@Srivatsan Some would probably approve. :) It was just that one guy.

@Henning: Your ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter??

@Srivatsan I've been a lay judge a number of times. I generally bring shoes with me to wear in the court room, lest the defendant gets the impression that his case is not being taken seriously. The shoes come on only in the anteroom to the actual courtroom, though.

@Srivatsan It wasn't the bus company's policy, but individual drivers. Statistically, the chance that the next driver wouldn't be a jerk was overwhelming.

@AsafKaragila No, that's my $\pi$. PI = Principal Investigator, i.e. the guy whose grant paid my wages.

@AsafKaragila True. The same logic would apply to formal meetings, conference dinners (as you mentioned), etc., I suppose.

Oh.

@Asaf There's also a Co-PI. I am sure you will be interested to know. =)

Oh, these co-jokes...

@Srivatsan The diameter of the circle of the circumference ratio?

I pre-fetched my response for that comment =)..

Co-pi would be a small sigma, I suppose?

And we all know how @Asaf hates sigmas...

One of my profs here is a barefooter, which I understand only in retrospect.

I have no problem with sigmas.

I have a problem with sums of finite numbers...

@Asaf: I was referring to recent comments of yours on my paper. :)

Ah, got it.

As opposed to sums of infinite numbers?

You see, descriptive set theory is full of capital sigma and pi (also delta) and the lowercase sigma is useful in many other contexts as well.

@HenningMakholm Yes, sum of cardinals.

@AsafKaragila A papal conclave?

At first I was heading towards large cardinals and forcing. I'd tell people that I investigate child molestation in the Catholic church sometimes.

Oops

@HenningMakholm what does the addition table look like for that?

I defined the power set today. I told my students a rule of thumb that if the set has n elements then the power set must have 2^n elements.

So the empty set has only one subset, and a pair has four. Then I gave them a riddle, how many subsets has the set of natural numbers and I told them the answer will come in roughly two months.

@AsafKaragila and how many? 10000450400500001345001052?

Huh?

Oh, oh, I know! I know! There are infinitely many.

@HenningMakholm this is not how many. and btw, listening to Asaf I even not sure now that your answer is right )

@AsafKaragila So what's the title of the course again? I don't recall it...

Introduction to logic and set theory.

@AsafKaragila do you have any lecture notes (in English)?

Nope.

@AsafKaragila were you at least satisfied by the level of students?

not impressed of course, but satisfied

It's the first class, but they did okay.

@AsafKaragila that's good. I remember our first class in BSc. we were told about operations with sets and Cartesian products

we managed to answer what is the product of two segments, segment and circle etc. but we were impressed that product of two circles is tor

We start with the basic concepts of \in,\subseteq,P(A),\cup,\cap,\setminus, how to write a short proof, etc.

short proof? is it just how to prove things in short rigor way?

We did some proofs on the board.

For example, A\cup B=B iff A\subseteq B.

A\subseteq B iff A\setminus B=\varnothing.

To get a torus out of the product of two circles requires some topology in addition to the raw Cartesian product, doesn't it?

These proofs are quite short.

icic, I thought that maybe it's a concept in logic/set theory

What am I missing here? Isn't that perfectly obvious?

@HenningMakholm precisely. but these questions were just to test our way of thinking. We were not able to say that you can make a bijection between direct product of two circles and [0,1] so torus was quite a simple answer for this question, wasn't it?

@tb I would not say it is perfectly obvious. I think it is clear that we have some isolated points there :-)

@tb Whatever you're missing, so am I :-)

@robjohn So you're both missing an active order of a Glenfiddich Snow Phoenix shipped to my apartment.

By golly, I want that whiskey. It is supposed to be wunderbar!

@AsafKaragila Ah, that is what we're missing :-)

@AsafKaragila sinking long TA's day in a glass of whiskey? ;-p

Then I looked at the clear liquid and remarked that it really not arak, and whiskey would have been a better example...

heh, elaborate comments on "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" :D

:D.

Um... is it common practice on MO not to roll back to a meaningful version of the question?

Hm. I think everybody expected it to be deleted as spam quickly but it survived for a few hours now. With a bit of effort the original question could have been made a somewhat reasonable one, I believe.

@Henning: Have you see my question from last night about the surreals?

@AsafKaragila Is this typical?

@AsafKaragila I saw it, but (shock! horror!) I'm not very knowledgeable about surreals.

@HenningMakholm Shame. I was hoping you'd be :-)

@JonasTeuwen Only in Bollywood yeshivas.

Awww :(.

Is the tall guy John Cleese?

Unlikely.

He's not silly enough.

Cleese or the video guy?

Hmmm... I comment that it ought to be possible to prove such and such. The OP then asks if I have a reference for that result.

Do you?

Also, of course that the guy on the video. Cleese is one of the silliest people ever to have silly-walked the earth!

Kotel Kanim is a Hebrew idiom for a sharp student.

Yeah, but Louis de Funès comes close.

@AsafKaragila If I did, I whould have phrased my guess a bit more assertively.

@HenningMakholm I guess so :-)

I beat Arturo, but only because he took time to explain inclusion-exclusion.

Darn; I've capped.

in search of bounties, arrr!

Well, no votes for you then.

@AsafKaragila I don't think this OP is going to accept. They got their answer and have boogied.

@robjohn: Indiscretion: André's answer starts by "(Deleted: @robjohn was faster)"

@tb André's answer to which question?

@robjohn: the one you just linked to.

Oh, a deleted answer that I can't see?

Exactly. (you beat him by 26 seconds)

Is it obvious to you 10K+ people that there is a deleted answer?

Yes -- deleted answers are always shown, but at the bottom of the answer sequence

(And with at colored background, to indicate that it is deleted)

@robjohn: yes. They're shown on a pink background (the same you see when you delete an answer).

Ah, that makes sense.

pink? I've always seen it to be purple...

The background colors look like the colors of litmus paper: pink and blue.

@anon: I lack an x chromosome to be sure about that.

@tb You have no X chromosomes?

I've located one of my deleted answers and it looks to be pink to me. What happens if someone <10K tries that link?

Dichromatism is X chromosome linked, so having two of them increases the chance of getting working genes from one of your parents.

@robjohn: darn mathematicians... I lack a second X chromosome in my karyotype

@robjohn We see it the same way, together with two other deleted answers ...

@HenningMakholm you have 10K+

Sure I have. That doesn't mean I can read an inequality correctly.

:-)

@robjohn: here's a deleted answer of mine

It just sends me to the question. I see no deleted answer.

Here is the link to the deleted answer itself

@HenningMakholm Same thing. Just the question and undeleted answers.

you need the 10k+ goggles. :D

but you can still see your own deleted answers

(in the same purple aura)

@anon I know. I just didn't know what a direct link would do.

ah

@robjohn: you should see the counter indicate "2 answers", we see it indicate "3 answers", two normally displayed and the third one pinked out.

@robjohn Click the "link" right next to the "edit" button.

@TheChaz: hey, you were looking for me earlier today?

@t.b. How about now?

ahh yes

@HenningMakholm That's how I got the link to my deleted answer that I posted above.

Is the reason for your recent name change private info, or would you be willing to share?

@TheChaz: What's up?

(just out of curiosity)

@robjohn Strange. I got the link I posted the same way.

@robjohn You don't know that...

@AsafKaragila If he doesn't know what he thinks and doesn't think, then who would know?

@AsafKaragila I don't know what I don't know.

@robjohn: But apparently you know that you don't know what you don't know.

@HenningMakholm You've hit me on the head... I don't think :-)

@HenningMakholm Talk quote Alice in Chains: If I could, would you?

@robjohn This is why being positive works better: I know what I know. :-)

@AsafKaragila I thought it was "... would you"

@TheChaz: I tried to push my SE-account from the top Google hits when people Google my real name. see here and the comments here for more info.

@TheChaz That's what I wrote :-)

What, people e-mailed you for advice? Why didn't they ask on the website...!?!

@AsafKaragila Ah

@Rob: My most recent blog post borrows an answer from your question yesterday. Thought you might want to know.

@Jonas: I've been emailed, too - but only once.

What do those people want?

@Jonas: Their inevitable doom.

I have only been e-mailed once, maybe I'm not good enough :-).

@tb Thanks for the info. I'll try to keep my requests for personal advice confined to chat :)

@Jonas: all kinds of things. Info on how to increase attention when asking questions here, advice on how to study, literature requests, offers to collaborate, and so on. Quite annoying.

^wow... didn't realize it was that bad! Didn't mean to make light of a serious annoyance.

@MikeSpivey Nice. I remember you said you might blog about using different methods in binomial sums.

Dammit, The Chaz! You tricked me!!!

My original quote was correct. It is indeed "If I would, could you?"

@t.b.: I'm really sorry about that. I guess there are advantages to not being among the top ten most reputable mathematicians on math.SE ;)

@AsafKaragila How so? Oh... really?! Every time I hear that on my Pandora station, it sounds like [what I wrote]

I listen to the MTV Unplugged version almost all the time.

@AsafKaragila Rooster has some nice lines, but I don't know how we got started on grunge

Woo. @t.b. and his lavender gravatar are ninth.

@TheChaz Does it matter?

You could as well add to your profile "don't e-mail me if you have nothing interesting to say.". Note sure if that would work.

+1

@robjohn Yeah, it's kind of a follow-up to an earlier post on using complex numbers to evaluate binomial sums. I seem to have been on a binomial sum kick lately.

@TheChaz: The thing is that my participation here is supposed to be fun and helpful to many. I'm not the right person to talk to when it comes to problems with advisors, studies, specific mathematical problems. I like to choose the things I'm thinking about. I really don't like to be impolite and not answer emails, but somehow these mails forced me to do so.

Does anyone here play (so-called "European") Board Games?

Every once in a while, a binomial sum comes up that grabs my attention for a while. They can be useful as well as interesting.

@tb I wonder what kind of c*** Arturo and Qiaochu have to deal with along these lines.

@TheChaz Like Ticket To Ride?

@TheChaz Like Settlers of Catan? (Is that European?)

Yes and yes

And Dominion

@tb I have to ask you something, were you the one making a null-edit to some post of mine once with the Hebrew saying "Hello from Zurich"? :-)

Settlers came out in Germany... won game of the year 15 years ago

@MikeSpivey Ah, yes. We played a couple of games of the US Western Expansion version of Settlers a couple of weeks ago.

@Mike: I fear the worst. I've seen a few people ask Arturo if they can email him, and he responded politely that he'd prefer to confine his SE-activity to the site (as if that weren't enough...)

I liked it more than I thought I would.

@TheChaz A few years ago one of my friends started a Settlers game night. We played every couple of weeks. It dropped off, though, and I haven't played in a couple of years.

Well I play those live and online, if anyone ever wants to play

@AsafKaragila : who else?

@tb Yeah, I figured that much. :-)

(usually using the "brettspeilwelt" free client software)

We also play the ... Rails series, like European Rails and China Rails. I think those are German as well.

also Dominion and Carcasonne

@Asaf: I wanted to earn you an enlightened badge for that answer, I think I succeeded :) I bugged you quite a bit with a misquotation from Wiki, IIRC

Hehe... well, thanks I guess!

@TheChaz I once spent a couple of hours with the original (I think there were no expansion packs) version of Carcasonne trying to see if I could make all the squares fit together legally. It took me a while, but I got it. I wondered if there might be some actual math there - maybe something worth writing up for the J. of Recreational Mathematics - but I never pursued it.

@MikeSpivey From the little that I know of tiling, having a "matching rule" would be good (though it wouldn't be universal, as in the penrose/aperiodic tiles)

@MikeSpivey it would probably be something along the lines of "place these tiles first"

Anyone ever been to Carcassonne? Beautiful place! There's a hit album (in France and Switzerland) of that name by Stephan Eicher, and some texts by the great Philippe Djian.

@robjohn Well, yesterday or the day before Didier caught me :)

(we play carcassone, dominion, power grid, seerauber, *of catan, etc. here)

@tb so you were tenth for a day?

@robjohn: No I was 8th for about a week (when I'd overtaken Pete). Then the notorious W and a few more answers gave Didier what he deserved...

We play * of Catan, * Rails, different versions of Ticket to Ride, and sometimes Munchkin Quest (American)

@MikeSpivey There is a board game called Tsuro that is pretty amazing that way. (Though especially to a group theorist; it is a very neat symmetry and geometry problem to design "tsuro-esque" games.)

@robjohn Ah, I thought you were talking about the Beatles song

@JackSchmidt Cool. Any papers on it?

@tb Ah, so Didier is ahead of you now at 8th.

yep.

Unfortunately, I have no time for board games any more. My evenings and weekends these days are spent taking care of our three kids (a 3-yr-old and 10-month-old twins).

@tb :-) there are a series of rail games called Ticket to Ride.

@MikeSpivey Don't think so. My wife and I wrote up our notes on it.

@MikeSpivey When we had our son and he was young, the gang came to our house for gaming.

Oh crap. Henning was 400 behind me yesterday, now he's 40. Oh well, I'll still be on the front page.

we really liked "small world", but didn't like munchkin quest much

Sometimes, a friend would bring a new musical instrument for our son to see.

@JackSchmidt Ever thought of publishing those notes? I remember a few years ago Jessica Sklar from Pacific Lutheran University (across town, which is why I remember) published an article in Mathematics Magazine on the mathematics of some computer game puzzles.

i haven't played any of the rails or ticket to rides

@JackSchmidt Munchkin Quest is a lot like Dungeon! on steroids.

@robjohn A good idea, but with three kids at those ages, the chances of us being interrupted repeatedly are too high. In a few years things should get better.

@Mike: my plan is to polish notes into either papers or blog posts in the summer. my job has no publishing requirement at all, so the pressure to publish is only so that people can read it :-)

@robjohn Well somehow I'm no longer used to these crowded places in the rep-scale. Quite stressful when there are four excellent mathematicians right next to you in within 1000 pts.

@robjohn hehe i liked dungeon as a kid, but nobody in our current group likes it. munchkin quest had too many rules and rule lawyering (which i gather is sort of its schtick)

@JackSchmidt If you play it a number of times, the rules become more manageable.

@Jack: Well, if you do ever publish them I would be interested in taking a look at the resulting article.

we've had a lot of fun with the cooperative games: pandemic, forbidden island

It took me a number of times until I got all the rules.

@Mike: sure. If you take a look at the game, I'm happy to share my notes.

(my and my wife's hehe, she has pressure to publish, but is doing fine)

@TheChaz: are you still here?

@Jack: Is she at Kentucky, or are you having to do the long-distance two-body problem thing?

@JackSchmidt 1. My issue with forbidden island is that you could effectively just deal yourself four role cards. 2. we need to play some games together!

(yes)

(obviously)

sorry, I didn't know who could see what

(e.g. you seeing my reply to Jack)

@TheChaz: Concerning the Halloween incident: I don't think that Arturo was annoyed by your Chuck-comparison (which I found hilarious). I think he rather was annoyed by that question.

@The chaz: yes, it is very difficult to keep the group individualized. We're a relaxed group, so its normally fine, but if anyone is aggressive, it is clearly a good idea to agree on what everyone does, so sometimes one person starts playing everyone

we've been thinking of google hangout or skype thing for board game night, but our "civilized" group has a camera shy guy and our uncivilized group is probably unwise to uhm broadcast

@MikeSpivey she's at kentucky. i'm the second body they found a job for :-)

@tb I agree. (I managed to catch that question before it was deleted, too.)

@tb That question came and went in about 2 minutes! I really respect Mr. Magidin, and he has been courteous in our email correspondence

@JackSchmidt I have dominating tendencies, so maybe that's why I noticed. Let me know if/when you're ever in a non-camera-shy setting! I have G+, skype, etc

@JackSchmidt Got it. :) My wife and I also had the two-body problem, and were able to solve it with our current location. She's a physicist, though, not a mathematician.

@TheChaz: Mike Jones' comment stems from a meta.MO thread in which he was asked by one of the MO moderators never to post on that site again.

@TheChaz Well, I was chatting with Srivatsan and all of a sudden he made a remark "Why do mathematicians absolutely hate ravioli" which made me look at the front page.

"He is extremely gifted in mathematics and in teaching. He set the bar high but worked even harder helping us learn than he expected any of us to work." - Guess who is the subject of this comment!

@AsafKaragila: Sorry, to what do you refer?

@tb Um, what are you and Asaf talking about?

^^

Hint: "Great professor, and keeps a cool head when it comes to students not understanding and asking questions. Very friendly and isn't too hard at all if you pay attention. Not too much homework either." is another comment on the same guy.

I have received 5 bounties. In the Bounties earned section of my profile, I see in the right column, names that I assume are the donators of the bounties, however, on one, my name appears. What does that right column show?

@AsafKaragila You, I presume. :)

Wrong :-)

"Professor Magidin is a great math teacher. As long as you do the homework and attend class you will be fine. He seems sort of cold and blunt, but he's always willing to help whether you have a question in class or you go to him during his office hours."

Can you guess now?

@Asaf: Are you checking out math.SE contributors' RMP pages now? :)

He got >4.5 on most counts, and 2.8 on easiness. on RMP

Yes, but ... what does this have to do with Mike Jones?

RMP?

rate my prof

Just wondered, if he puts this much effort into math.SE... what his students would say??

@MikeSpivey Let me look up the links. Meanwhile: the same person posted a question: "Why do people absolutely hate statistics?" or something to that effect.

@TheChaz: It was completely unrelated. To quote M. Python "...and now for something completely different."

@t.b. Ok now I remember what you're talking about. It was like "Why do mathematicians hate stats"

@AsafKaragila "We're all individuals"... "I'm not!"

@AsafKaragila That is a good question. It seems it could go either way: Either his posts on math.SE are an indicator of how he approaches his classes, or his time on math.SE takes away from his classes. Glad to know it appears to be the former. I'm afraid it might be the latter for me. Fortunately I'm on sabbatical now.

@MikeSpivey here and here (for 10k+-guys - and -gals)

One day I'll be there (10k), if I can ever get my sense of humor under control...

@tb Thanks. I actually thought the statistics question could have been turned into something interesting if it hadn't been phrased in such a confrontational manner.

And if it hadn't been paired with the "I wanna be like Arturo" question.

Would anyone care to help me (via chat) improve/correct my answer? math.stackexchange.com/questions/77994/…

@TheChaz: Pete's comment pretty much says it all.

Just say that for f(x)=1/x (x\ne0) and f(x)=a (x=0) for some a isn't continuous at x=0 no matter what a is.

In light of Arturo's answer contrasting "discontinuous" and "not continuous", though.

Because we're not considering all points outside of the domain, but a specific one (viz x = 0)

I just checked; you can favorite a deleted question and it goes in your favs list.

@anon And I can even see it in your favs list...

Really? Cool!

I'll start doing that.

@anon Which is a pretty cool collection, by the way.

I think I'm more proud of my favs list than my rep.

@TheChaz Just say: it is impossible to extend f(x) = 1/x to a continuous function on all of R because lim f(x) = -\infty if x -> 0- and lim f(x) = +\infty if x-> 0+

You don't have that question in which that guy which posted a lot of questions were suspended for plagiarism on his blog and on the site. Right?

So no chance to fulfill the epsilon-delta requirement for any value f(0) = a (as anon said)

@t.b.. And here I was, thinking that I had said that... alas! (and sigh)

@Asaf: If any of his q's were deleted, no. Otherwise if he had a good one it might be in my collection.

Which user was this, do you recall?

I do. I prefer not to say that on the chat.

Gotcha.

@anon: You do have a cool favorites list. I have to say I have mixed feelings about the question at the top of your list ("Can I use my powers for good?"). My highest upvoted answer on the site is to that question, but that also means that my highest upvoted answer is about career advice, not mathematics. :(

I dislike that question.

hello

It fits this site only because it fits nowhere else. It should had been a community wiki to begin with.

@Mike: It's all about supply and demand, really. (I also put in a couple questions I wanted to look back at later but was too lazy to take off.)

@all. Hopefully the revision is correct. I'm off to work. It has been a pleasure math.stackexchange.com/questions/77994/…

@anon: I know, and the question went viral, too, garnering votes from people who are primarily users of other SE sites.

Woops, there was an obvious sign error in my recent answer. 45min and 3 upvotes later I had to find it myself. :)