« first day (2018 days earlier)      last day (3299 days later) » 

13:02
@TedShifrin Oh, you were cutting it in half the other way? I thought you were cutting the donut in half the way one would actually cut a donut in half (i.e. leaving an annular surface on which to spread cream cheese).
@AkivaWeinberger Why would you put cream cheese on a donut?
I mean bagel.
Ahh, that sounds a lot better
Same shape. They were actually just talking about a torus.
Though, now that I think about it, cream cheese on a doughnut probably isn't so bad…
Cream cheese on a sweet donut?
:-/
13:06
@skullpetrol wb pal :D
Can't know until you've tried it
Thanks pal @Idle001 :D
Like pineapple on a pizza. *ducks*
hmm yes anon and alec were been long term absent
13:07
i used to see their icons permanently
Alex too.
14:03
Agreed. Even if we attempt to push further by trying to enumerate all the possible ways the proof can be subverted, or at least the existence problem on whether it is possible given a truth statement, it's basically just pushing the same question further back and not really did much

hmm...
I have a question about the Flajolet–Martin algorithm, aka Probabilistic Counting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flajolet%E2%80%93Martin_algorithm. I am trying to draw understand the distribution.
Excuse the rather basic quesiton - my theory needs a lot of work.
"n fact, in probabilistic terms,
the quantity
R
is precisely distributed in the same way as 1 plus the maximum
of
n
independent geometric variables of parameter
1
2
. "

So the binary of the hash is geom, ok...

question is, why not just use p=1/32 instead of separate geom rand vars
15:07
hello @I'manartist see someone gave a shot to ur problem
@Idle001 yeah, still my problems are pretty advanced (both for MSE and MO).
@I'manartist ofcourse, cant dare to get arround em
@Idle001 hehe, I was just in the middle of some awesome research. :D
Any ping reminds me to get a break from working, and maybe trying to east something.
It's 17:11 here and didn't eat anything. My mind is sharper when I eat less.
ew, i just bear a cup of coffee in my hand
@Idle001 My work is more important than me (it may sounds a bit of nonsense, but well, it is so).
15:14
The following exercise from my book seems extremely esoteric to me. Is there a motivation for this?
@I'manartist that is what militants say, my case is more important than me, or my weapon is more important than i
anyone who has a case to defend, or a goal to reach
bbl
need another cup of coffee
@GPhys: that looks to be an example of an integral transform with kernel $k(x,y)$ supported on $[0,1]$.
15:21
@GPhys I wonder if that's an isometry.
it's from an open source book, if you wanted to browser the chapter: jirka.org/ra/realanal.pdf
so the problem amounts to showing that, if you change your initial function 'smoothly', then the transform changes smoothly as well
integral transforms come up a ton in applications, so it's not as esoteric as it seems
@GPhys: This is the integral form of a differential operator, which makes it easier to allow non-smooth input. $k$ stands for kernel.
If $k$ is nice enough such an operator actually increases the smoothness of your input.
i'm more used to examples with the kernel being supported on the entire real line or half the real line
but that's just a change of variables
Yeah me too.
But they didn't want to talk about spaces of functions that weren't continuous and the easiest way to get a Hilbert space is to restrict to ones on the interval.
15:27
say, by substituting $y=\tanh u$
@MikeMiller good point
i can actually come up with a physics example where that'd come up, now that i think of it
take $y$ to be the position coordinate of a quantum-mechanical particle in a box, and suppose $f(y)$ is its wavefunction in position space
then the choice of $k(x,y)=e^{i x y}$ gives (modulo some constants/rescalings) the momentum-space wavefunction as $\phi_f(x)$
Ah, thanks all. It seemed fairly "out there" relative to the other exercises.
Integral operators are pretty important I suppose.
yeah. and integral transforms are huge in engineering/physics/applied math
albeit usually in the sense of "what does this particular kernel give us" rather than kernels in the abstract
my example isn't actually quite right for the problem as stated, since the wavefunction are generically complex-valued (and the Fourier kernel $e^{i x y}$ definitely is)
probably one would need to head over to the regular wave equation (vibrations of a string etc) to find a pure example
Hi @iwriteonbananas.
$f(x, y) = 2x^4 - 3x^2y + y^2$ is a weird beast. The origin is a critical point which is a local minimum restricted to any line through origin, but is not a local minimum point for $f$.
What's more, apparently the Hessian of $f$ at $(0, 0)$ is degenerate. So annoying.
@Semiclassical: I mean usually we're considering specific PDE too, so it's not much different.
15:42
true
The cases where we're not amount to the general theory of elliptic linear PDE
Because what else can we do without restricting ;P
Actually, I wonder if it's possible that critical pt of $f$ is the origin which is a local minimum for $f$ restricted to any line through origin but is not a local minimum for $f$ - yet hessian of $f$ is nondegenerate. I doubt this.
Right, of course it's not possible.
Anyone have any experience with optimization? Thinking about asking a question on main, but unsure how to formulate it.
I'll have to try that problem later. It will involve going back and checking more definitions than usual for this chapter.
15:45
(argument: if hessian is nondegenerate, then it must locally look like either $x^2 + y^2$, $x^2 - y^2$ or $-x^2 - y^2$. So it's either a local minimum, maximum or a saddle. the first two cases are outright cancelled off. it cannot be a saddle, because then you have a line along which $f$ increases and a line along which $f$ decreases, so the condition is not satisfied)
@N3buchadnezzar Hi.
@BalarkaSen hey man
I have some ovens, some water taps which produces a different amount of water / heat etc. Say for simplicity sake they are most efficient when they produce at a given rate.
So say $x_1 = 10$, $x_2 = 15$ and $x_3 = 30$. The efficiency is zero of the oven is off, otherwise it is given as 100*(x - a)^2.
Hello @iwriteonbananas.
Is any done with this beautiful one?
My problem was to figure out what rate to run the ovens / taps to maximize the efficiency when you want to produce T heat. Seems complicated
15:52
i think that if you're waiting for a "no pencil and paper" response to an integral that involves Ei(x) in a nontrivial way, you'll be waiting a while
@BalarkaSen I'm going to be algebraic topology 1 teaching assistant next semester. I'm scared.
...though seeing as it numerically seems to come out to $\pi^3/4$, maybe i'm being hasty
@iwriteonbananas Congrats! What does alg top 1 entail?
@iwriteonbananas: I will also be TAing algebraic topology I at Muenster.
@BalarkaSen basic category theory notions, Van Kampen, singular and cellular homology, and applications. Essentially the same stuff that I did last semester.
@MikeMiller No way! You're going to Muenster?
16:05
Oh, no, I thought that's where you were.
Hehe, no but it's not too far off.
@iwriteonbananas Cool.
@BalarkaSen I don't know if it's cool, i'm kind of shitting my pants
When does the next semester start?
you'll be fine. You know your stuff.
16:07
@Semiclassical Mid april.
so about two months to get prepared
huh, apparently I haven't forgotten how to extremize.
hi
is anyone interested in number theory/prime gaps
if so you could look over an answer to a question I asked?
@BalarkaSen one thing worth noting is that that function factors as $(x^2 - y) (2 x^2 - y)$
which means that if you focus on, say, $x\geq 0$ and substitute $z=x^2$ (which is increasing on this domain) you get $(z-y)(2z-y)$ which is much nicer to analyze
@Semiclassical Yes, so $0$ is attained all along $y = x^2$. Indeed, you choose $y = x^2 + \epsilon$ to get $-\epsilon(x^2 - \epsilon)$ and make sure $\epsilon < x^2$ to guarantee a value smaller than $0$.
16:17
right.
So even if $(0, 0)$ is local minimum restricted to any line, you can get you value to be less than $f(0, 0) = 0$.
So it's not a global minimum.
Idea: I should badger you with my calculus problems whenever Ted's not here (i.e., majority of the times). Let me know what you think :)
haha
not sure he'd like that :P
16:19
Ted
you're the person who's supposed to be learning it, after all
returning to the question, though: in $(z,y)$ space you also have an explicit saddle point at the origin, which means there's a line going through the origin which has the fastest descent
and this in turn maps back to $(x,y)$ space to give a parabola of fastest descent
Oh, I mean, I am not going to ask you to do my problems - that'd miss the point of me learning calculus. But I was merely wondering if you'd like to hear a few of my own understanding and realizations.
Also, I come up with silly questions occasionally. A nudge towards the right direction can help me catch my silliness.
yeah, i understand. i was just being a pest :)
though maybe the better word is 'gadfly', which is what it sounds like you need
Anyone here know of a quicker way to do this problem?
0
Q: Predictive Distribution with Normal Prior

ClarinetistGiven $\Theta = \theta$, let $X_1, X_2, \dots, X_n, X_{n+1} \sim \mathcal{N}(\theta, \sigma^2_0)$ be independent. $\Theta \sim \mathcal{N}(\theta_0, \tau^2_0)$. What is the easiest way to find the distribution of $X_{n+1}\mid X_1, \dots, X_n$? I am looking only for hints. How I would start thi...

i am sure Ted'll be very glad if I badger him less.
:P
16:25
you may have a point there
@Semiclassical What do you mean by the fastest descent there?
actually, i think i misspoke back there
so i need to check something first
i called this week , the week of combinatorics, since my main interest to answer combinatoric questions
17:02
I'm done with my work for half an hour.
hey @pval
@Semiclassical hi
i realized one nice thing about your matrices, which makes producing them actually very simple in mathematica
first, if $A$ is your lower triangular matrix of ones, the inverse is lower bidiagonal with +1 on the main diagonal and -1 on the subdiagonal
which amounts to $A^{-1} = I-S$ where $S$ is a shift operator
@Semiclassical I interpreted the signature another way, and the whole problem fell apart kind of easily.
ahhh
for general sizes, or for your specific cases?
17:14
At least for n sufficiently large (which is larger than I computed).
I haven't thought about when $|sig|/dim<2/3$ in general but I imagine a similar argument works as long as the blocks and number of blocks is large enough.
probably
anyways, what i was going to point out is that the total matrix is the symmetrization of a certain bidiagonal block matrix, whose elements are $A$ on the subdiagonal and $-A$ on the main diagonal
which i can write as a Kronecker product of $A_p$ with $-I_q+S_q$ where $S$ is the shift operator i said above
which, using the characterization i gave above, means that the total matrix is the symmetrization of $-A_p \otimes A_q^-1$
and that's probably the easiest for mathematica to define the matrices
@Semiclassical Somewhat amazingly the signature for r blocks of size q is $\sum_{i=1}^{q}\sum_{j=1}^{r}sign(\sin\pi(\frac i{q+1}+\frac j{r+1}+\frac12))$. Which is a lot easier to deal with than the forms themselves.
17:30
hmm!
now i want to prove that :P
not sure why you'd do $\sin(\pi/2+\Theta)$ instead of $-\cos\Theta$, though
You can replace the 1/2 with a more general formula involving a 3rd summand, for related forms.
ahh
what kind of related forms?
In theory I think I know how to write the matrices corresponding to these forms but I havent went through it yet.
@Akiva = DogAteMy ... We were cutting the bagel horizontally (the way you would spread cream cheese). I stand by my remarks :P
hi @PVAL @Semiclassic @Idle
17:42
hi @ted
You should cut the bagel along a trefoil
hi
You should give me the bagel so I can eat it.
@MikeM: Actually, Karim needs to see the picture cutting it along a 1,1-curve. But I told him to give me a CW structure if we slice it horizontally.
17:44
@PVAL: If someone gave me a bagel cut along a trefoil I would eat it.
Hi @TedShifrin.
Hello @Balarka
@MikeM: I've not seen Cliff Taubes in decades, but I always thought he was nice.
I explained Karim what's happening with the delta complex structure of the torus.
So did I, Balarka :D I wanted him to do extra examples. We struggled on a sphere with 2 2-cells. Now he's supposed to be doing the torus when we cut it horizontally.
17:45
Thanks @Ted.
I don't think he can manage to picture a (1,1)-curve on the torus to cut it in half along it ...
I drew the diagonal curve for him when he said he couldn't.
@MikeM: General rule of thumb would be to bug reasonable experts closer to you first ...
You drew it for him on the torus? @Balarka
@Ted: I don't know who those are.
17:47
Cool ... @Balarka: I described it to him, wanting him to try to draw it, but that's fine with me.
I guess Peter would be first.
I doubt that, @MikeM. Peter does (did) totally different stuff.
I didn't know you assigned it to him, otherwise I wouldn't have revealed.
@Ted: Then I think we're out of options. This is not Ciprian's style.
I didn't assign it, Balarka. He put up the picture from Hatcher. I assigned him easier problems.
OK, @MikeM ... unless you know some younger guys who work on gauge theory stuff.
17:49
@Ted: Matt (you met him) and I are thinking about it, but ASD metrics are somehow very different than ASD connections, and nowadays much less popular.
@TedShifrin As a side note, I haven't forgotten much of the calculus I have learnt.
Or so I think.
@Balarka: What's the easiest example of a finite-dimensional CW structure that is not a $\Delta$ complex?
I went though a couple exercises from the book, and apparently I can do them.
I'll try the harder ones after I finish revising.
@TedShifrin S^2.
@pval interestingly, from what i'm seeing numerically, the spectra of those matrices are approximately symmetric in distribution about $-1$
1 2-cell.
1 0-cell.
17:51
Oh, I've forgotten the rules. You have to have codimension 1 faces along which to glue for $\Delta$?
Yes, you need to glue the faces of one simplex to faces of other simplex, preserving orientation.
That didn't quite answer my question.
You're required to glue in codimension 1 ?
@Ted: Yes.
This is more tautological than I think you'd like. Gluings in CW complexes are along maps; gluings in delta ocmplexes are along linear homeomorphisms.
@TedShifrin I don't know what a face of codimension 2 means. But yes.
OK, thanks. I never learned about $\Delta$ complexes when I took algebraic topology, and when I've worked with the grad students on the topology qual we've just talked about cellular homology.
You have "faces" of all dimensions up to the top dimension, @Balarka.
17:54
actually, i'm wrong (though not so wrong)
That's the main difference. It's straightforward to see that you can subdivide a CW complex into a Delta complex iff the CW gluing maps are embeddings
@MikeM: So attaching maps can only have degree $\pm 1$?
@TedShifrin Oh, I don't call those faces. But I see what you mean.
@TedShifrin Yes.
What do you call 'em, @Balarka?
Well, now we all know why I've never been a topologist :D
@Ted: You're thinking of them wrong. We don't attach by the boundary. We attach by the faces.
17:55
@MikeM: I much prefer cellular :D
@TedShifrin Nothing particular. Simplices. :)
But, still, I can triangulate a ball and think about building $\Bbb RP^n$.
$\Delta$-complexes are a semi-linear version of CW-complexes. The most linear version is simplicial complexes, where each simplex is uniquely determined by the faces.
Damn, Facebook sure gets annoying on birthdays :P
Or at least, that's my personal philosophy.
@TedShifrin Oh, happy birthday!
17:57
@TedShifrin People have a hard time with the pictures.
Thanks. Well, triangulations are a pain. In diff geo when we do Gauss-Bonnet, I make my students triangulate a torus and a 2-holed torus. It takes some ridiculous number of faces ...
@TedShifrin The local degree formula is a nontrivial bit though. I use to think that's why Hatcher introduces cellular homology late.
Oh yeah triangulations are shit.
Yes, @Balarka. It's again why I would prefer to teach alg top to people who already knew some diff top. :)
I think the minimal triangulation on a torus requires like 27 faces.
17:59
I think it's 18, @Balarka.
@Ted: 14.
Hmm ...
In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Heawood graph is an undirected graph with 14 vertices and 21 edges, named after Percy John Heawood. == Combinatorial propertiesEdit == The graph is cubic, and all cycles in the graph have six or more edges. Every smaller cubic graph has shorter cycles, so this graph is the 6-cage, the smallest cubic graph of girth 6. It is a distance-transitive graph (see the Foster census) and therefore distance regular. There are 24 perfect matchings in the Heawood graph; for each matching, the set of edges not in the matching forms a Hamiltonian cycle. For instance...
OK ... Well, the obvious one for an undergraduate to find from the rectangle picture is 18 :P
I think I once saw a proof that the triangulation I'm referring to is minimal.
18:01
I'd like to see that proof.
Heya @AndrewT
@TedShifrin Good thing about $\Delta$ complexes is that there is always a canonical homeomorphism with a simplicial complex, by barycentrically subdividing twice.
Oh, I didn't know that. So if we take the simplest $\Delta$ complex for the torus and do this, how many faces do we end up with in the triangulation? 18, I'm guessing.
Is it your birthday, @TedShifrin? If yes; happy birthday!
18:03
@Ted: See the discussion on page 10 here.
@TedShifrin Bonsoir
LOL, yes, @AndrewT. Thanks.
Eh. You have to $2$ 2-simplices. Barycentrically subdividing a triangle gives 6 triangles, right? So 1st step gives $12$. And the second step gives $72$...
@TedShifrin Joyeux anniversaire!
Everything is determined by the number of vertices, and you can minimize the number of faces by minimizing the number of vertices. There's a bound: $V \geq \frac{1}{2}\left(7+\sqrt{49-24\chi(M)}\right).$
18:05
@TedShifrin Just got your reply. — Wait, I thought you said that each half has only half of a longitude, or something like that.
Merci bien @JeSuis.
Am I confusing longitude and meridian?
So it suffices to construct a triangulation of the torus with 7 vertices, which is possible.
This is the minimal picture.
@pval what i saw specifically is that for large matrices, the eigenvalues appear to be symmetrically distributed around -1. however, there's a a fraction of them (about 1/n) which occur at negative values and which don't have a positive partner
Longitudes are the horizontal lines, right? The ones that vary in size? And the meridians are the vertical ones
@TedShifrin
18:07
I can never keep track of what is horizontal and what is vertical.
Why can't people say 'up-to-down' and 'left-to-right'
Backwards, @Akiva.
@Ted: That's not backwards to me.
Think about latitude and longitude on the sphere, guys.
I thought meridian were the vertical ones.
18:09
@AndrewThompson "Horizontal's down the hall, vertical is up the wall"
@TedShifrin No.
i.e., the ones which bound disk.
On a sphere, meridians and longitudes are the same thing, I thought
@AkivaWeinberger As both were described with 'up' and 'down' it doesn't make sense to me.
@AndrewThompson I can never keep track of what is up and what is left.
18:10
I call them profile curves and parallels to remove ambiguity.
Meridians are parallels.
taking the case of $2n=40$, for instance, Mathematica gives the following histograms (the first for the entire range, the second for just 'near' -1):
@Akiva: Just because you find it on the internet doesn't make it correct. People post wrong crap all the time.
But they're both parallel, in the sense of not intersecting others of the same type.
18:10
For a surface of revolution, parallel means literally parallel.
@TedShifrin Confusing, I thought parallels mean the longitudes because they run parallely to an imaginary center circle of the torus.
Conclusion: You cannot remove ambiguity.
No, @Balarka. They are literally parallel in Euclidean space.
@TedShifrin Right, I figured after you said they were meridians :P
18:12
@MikeMiller Very cool. Thanks.
lol, we have successfully confused @Akiva.
Now the dog really will eat his homework.
@Ted: In topology, a longitude of a knot is a curve on a small torus around it that has zero linking with the knot. A meridian is a curve on said small torus that has linking 1.
Wait, doesn't that agree with my link?
18:14
I.E. Meridian=small ones
So that appears to be backwards from the geometry convention, @MikeM. Fuck you topologists.
that is standard terminology, iirc.
lol.
conventions, i shake my fist at thee!!!
@TedShifrin Longitude, as every topologist knows, stands for "long".
Maybe we should call them longitudes and shortitudes
18:15
Topologists don't even know what "long" and "short" mean.
But I can make the meridians long too.
i'm more used to the terminology of 'transverse' and 'longitudinal'
But which is which?
I'm sticking to profile curves and parallels.
This is fun.
18:16
I'm tired of this.
Oh, heck, I forgot I had questions to ask, @Ted.
"Transverse" makes me think of a universe that's open-minded to people's sexualities
Unless "verse" is short for "averse" :(
See, terminological problems abound.
Why does it even have the word "logical" in it
@TedShifrin In question 11, page 120, your function $F$ is not even defined on $v = 0$. Is that the reason of the paradox?
18:19
But is it defined on a meridian?
Tell me which section, @Balarka.
OK, I'll stop.
@TedShifrin 3.6. Higher partials.
This is the first question on the list, there's more.
If $F$ is not defined on $v = 0$, you can't get it to be defined on a square around the origin, so the solution done before doesn't apply.
I think you're wrong about the not defined on $v=0$.
You know, if we embed a torus in a 3-sphere, you can't even distinguish between the two. Its insides and outsides are homeomorphic (or even congruent if the torus has half the volume of the 3-sphere's surface volume).
18:23
@AkivaWeinberger: One talks about this in the context of knots.
Or geometry.
Correct, @Akiva. For the Clifford torus (which is what you're talking about), it's got zero curvature and is symmetric.
In which case they're distinghuishable.
3-spheres are geometry
I said "congruent"
@AkivaWeinberger Depends on the embedding I think.
@PVAL: The standard Clifford torus :P
18:25
@TedShifrin Aha, right, I misread an or as and.
LOL ... Only in English could you have a sentence saying an or as and.
I was just about to comment about that
@AkivaWeinberger I can even make the (1, 1) curve indistinguishable from the meridian, I think.
Lots of self-homeomorphisms of the torus.
@Akiva: 3-spheres considered as what kind of object?
A subset of $\Bbb R^4$?
18:26
Or as abstract Riemannian manifold of constant curvature :P
@TedShifrin Wrong
Spanish has "un o como y"
:P
What do you consider the automorphism group of the 3-sphere when it's a subset of $\Bbb R^4$?
Actually, I would have typed saying an "or" as "and." :P
@MikeMiller Its rotation group? Or something like that
@TedShifrin Wait, I am still not convinced. Is $F$ really defined at $(0, 0)$? I don't think so.
$u, v$ are neither $< 0$. Also, even if $u \geq 0$, $v > 0$ is not satisfied.
18:30
No, it's not defined at the origin, @Balarka, but you still have a path-connected space.
@MikeMiller Also its reflections, I guess.
Ok, so you're really considering it as a Riemannian manifold, or possibly as a metric space. I believe you now that it's geometry.
@TedShifrin But how you found the solutions to $\partial^2 F/\partial u \partial v = 0$ requires that $F$ is defined on some rectangle, because you're integrating. $F$ is not defined on a rectangle around $(0, 0)$.
So what?
You can get from anywhere to anywhere with little rectangles.
Oh, good point. Hmm. But then the $\phi, \psi$ would vary rectangle to rectangle.
I need to think.
@TedShifrin Yeah, so then, $F$ would be defined piecewise, i.e., rectanglewise. On each rectangle, it'd look like $\psi(u) + \phi(u)$, but not globally so, right?
That's what's happening to your $F$.
18:37
Why don't they patch?
@TedShifrin That's an interesting question. I feel like there's a specific reason but I can't come up with one.
This is a cool problem.
It's analogous to the beginning calculus issue of $f'=0$ on the domain tells us $f$ is constant. Or does it?
May I ask what the problem is? Out of curiosity
Make sure you don't do this one sideways, MyDogAte :P
@AkivaWeinberger I'll let you know what the problem is after I solve it :P
@TedShifrin It doesn't. $f$ can be $1$ on $[-1, 0)$ and $2$ on $(0, 1]$, right?
18:47
@TedShifrin Columbus isn't even the name of my dog. Her name is Matana.
"Columbus ate my homework" was just nonsense :P
Right, @Balarka. LOL, well, I tried, MyDogAte :P
I must admit, your calculus book is great. It's relatively much more enjoyable than Hatcher (relative means enjoyability modulo the vastness of the subject).
Hatcher is far, far, far ... more sophisticated.
salut @TedShifrin
salut @Idle :)
18:51
Hatcher can be more enjoyable, but algebraic topology is way more vast than calculus. That's why I said relative.
vous vous portez bien monsieur @TedShifrin ?
Oui, merci bien, M @Idle :)
ravi de le savoir monsieur ted
I just tried looking up "calculus textbook by shifrin," but Amazon keeps giving me this text by some guy named Theodore? :P
not theodore the bomber right ?
18:54
LOL, après vous, Georges Dandin.
In case you haven't noticed, they're probably the same person, @Akiva.
I was joking.
Hence the ":P"
@Idle001 lol I had forgotten unabomber's initial name was Theodore too.
@TedShifrin Shall I ask the second question?
i m not going to forget him and his wierd solution for society for sure
Go ahead, Balarka.

« first day (2018 days earlier)      last day (3299 days later) »