@leo Sorry to hear. My first algebra teacher was perhaps the best I had.

@egreg At my school are only 3 persons that teach algebra. This semester the profesor of Groups and Rings is the worst of them

3 or 4. I don't remember

there is deficit of algebrists

@leo Your university is small leo?

@leo It's everywhere, unfortunately.

yep. I think. However is the bigger in this country, and the only one where teach pure math

@leo Yeah, where I go we just rounded 25k students

No humanites, only math, physics and chemestry, engineering and medisin (I think.)

It have its ups and downs that too I guess.

this is my dear university

@N3buchadnezzar well, here we have Humanities, arts and so on

@leo I tried to open the Mathematics page, but it times out.

@egreg yep. All the pages of my university are out this weekend for maintenance

@leo wiki.math.ntnu.no/emner

Here is a list of our mathematical subjects, sorry that it is not in english.

Well cya, I must head over to my school now to work.

It is only 01 AM here, and my friend awaits me.

@N3buchadnezzar And Norwegian is not among the easiest language to guess; good work. I'm going to bed, instead. :)

@N3buchadnezzar sleep well!

@leo Usually I tell that the university where I studied was founded in 1222. :)

@N3buchadnezzar What's purple, and commutes? An Abelian grape.

@egreg about 300 years earlier Colon's great idea

an italian, by the way :-)

@leo 270 years before the famous trip. He was from Genoa.

@egreg te gustaría venir a enseñiar algebra aquí?

@AlanMunn Someone asked my thesis advisor "what's the fleeing element of a compact group?"

He studied compact groups, of course.

@leo Why not? :)

@egreg que bien

Good night all

@egreg good night! :-)

Back

@egreg Are you expecting me to guess? Ok. How about Haar today and gone tomorrow.

@egreg Padua!!?

@AndrewStacey Why am I not allowed to ask this question? I thought the question was interesting (a reason). I feel surprised you ask me for clarificaion but didn't ask the originators of the other how do we draw X questions. You feel you've seen enough of my contributions here that you don't really need to know the answers. Some people may find a comment like that offensive. Finally, I've had enough of TeX.SX policing. You won't see me again.

@AlanMunn The riddle has to do with cycling, of course. But it depends on how you call the big pack of cyclists during a race (in French it's the péloton).

@BrentLongborough Right.

@MarcvanDongen Whoa! Hold on there! Did you not see my message above? chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/3687905#3687905 That's precisely what I was trying to say: I have seen enough of your contributions to not need to know the answers to those questions from you, but I don't want to see "copy cat" questions. To show that I am consistent, let me point you to tex.stackexchange.com/q/31330/86. (ctd)

And let me also point out that I answered that one, and sent the code to Matthew via email.

I unreservedly apologise for any offence caused - it certainly was not my intention. I hoped that by posting the other part in chat that it would explain why I'd written that. I sincerely hope that you will not leave as I think that you have made many great contributions to the site.

@MarcvanDongen Rereading this comment, I see that I misread "You feel you've seen enough of my contributions here that you don't really need to know the answers. Some people may find a comment like that offensive.". So you did see my comment in chat. In that case, I'm all the more confused at your reaction. For sure, some might take something I say offensive. But I'd think that the fact I'd tried to explain something would show that I didn't intend any offence.

I now see that you're trying to delete all of your questions and answers. Please don't. This can be reversed and I've already voted accordingly (anyone with 10k can also vote accordingly). I'll say no more on this unless you respond as I don't want to make things any worse. If you'd rather continue the conversation privately, my email is fairly easy to track down.

Uhh. The chat is a battlefield again!

I don't like Mondays. :P

@PauloCereda When you have a three hour lecture, they are definitely bad.

@egreg So true! :) I feel the clock goes backwards. :)

@MarcvanDongen That's an interesting question. It's perhaps not completely clear if the goal is an Escher grid of birds or just any nice decorative bird. Perhaps the casual wording at the beginning might cause a non-interested comment. Please don't delete it because of a comment which is obviously an unintended misunderstanding and the poster apologized.

I just don't see what the author is thinking: he avoids XeTeX, but at the same wants pdfTeX to magically handle Unicode.

@AndreyVihrov T1 can't obviously support all European languages that use the Latin alphabet (Latvian, for instance). How could it support also cyrillic? The problem is that many users don't know about font management in LaTeX and its limitation to 256 slots per font.

Cool, Google Brazil has Villa Lobos in the logo! :)

Hmm, it seems that TeX Live ships hundreds of Makefiles as documentation…

@PauloCereda It's also the birthday of William Oughtred and of my brother. :)

@egreg We use the same word in English.

@egreg Yay, happy birthday! :)

@AlanMunn The same as in French?

@egreg Yes. Without the accent though, usually.

@AlanMunn So you couldn't understand the joke. :(

@egreg So it only works in Italian?

Wow! There's a buzz here about Fifa taking the World Cup to another country. :P

@AlanMunn I guess so: "L'elemento in fuga di un gruppo compatto."

Oh well. Now it makes sense. Out of curiosity, I put that phrase into Google translate. Since it doesn't know any syntax, it ended up with "The element in the escape of a compact group." which is pretty funny.

Phew! I guess I found the cause of a critical bug in the TeXPrinter app. :)

@egreg how come your links in comments have the title and mine have the truncated url? (the multicolumn table one)

@DavidCarlisle Unfortunately you have to put in the title manually in comments. The syntax is [title](url). In a regular question or answer, you can just paste the url and the title will be automatically added.

@DavidCarlisle Good question! When one votes for "possible duplicate", the system automatically adds a comment with the title. If you paste the URL it shows it truncated.

OK thanks,

Meanwhile, outside our beloved TeX.sx world:

See the weird Rebuttal from OP. I'd ragequit.

(Some background on the question: it's a known bug with one of Java L&F's. I was looking for a workaround and found this question - StackOverflow links are highly rated.)

@egreg What is happening with your votes? I just took a look at meta

@N3buchadnezzar A problem with an algorithm of the system that purports to check for "illegal votes". It's clearly flawed, but SE people don't think so.

@egreg =(

I just do not see the problem with illegal votes, I can not possibly imagine this being a big problem here. And even if it was, why does it matter? Extra points are "meaningless"

@N3buchadnezzar Don't worry, I didn't really lose 4360 rep points (I've reserves to cope with this).

@egreg =)

Well you answers always makes my day a little birghter, So I hope you continue to post answers, and get the rep you deserve.

@N3buchadnezzar The purpose of the algorithm is avoiding that people upvote their friends. I think to have proved that this can't be the case.

@egreg Oh, are not all people here your friends ? =)

@N3buchadnezzar I like to think so. :)

@egreg When I think of a possible purpose of SE, I could imagine, that unusual voting patterns may bias results. So even if the voting is legal and logical and well deserved, the fact that it's very diverging from the mainstream, could lead to the opinion that nullifying it could be better for a real view onto all content, though it's bad for the author and the single answers.

If such thoughts might be a possible reason, I would expect that to read as explanation, not just nope, that's illegal.

@egreg You have a little VP ellipsis problem there: I like to think so <del>that not all people here are my friends</del> :-)

Unfortunately, there are some other "unfair" voting patterns based on cognitive aspects that are impossible to trace. Questions with more votes are likely to get even more votes than the less scored ones.

@StefanKottwitz I just can't understand why upvoting my five answers of the previous day can be considered an "unusual voting pattern".

@StefanKottwitz I've been thinking that too.

I've lost 300 of my votes, so I'm probably one of the serial voters for the algorithm. But I can't really think of other way of behaving here. For me, votes have a very strong social impact, so that's why I vote a lot. By doing so, I want newcomers to feel accepted in the community and normal users to feel helpful with their effort and time to write their answers and even inspiring them to keep answering stuff here.

@PauloCereda Same for me! Sometimes when I noticed I did not vote much the days, I go and look for answers of newcomers, specifically. If I see good answers, I upvote, both to appreciate the content and to support the contributors in going ahead to site features

That could be considered as unusual too

Also sometimes I looked into a profile and read the answers if the user I missed. Leads also to a bit serial voting.

@StefanKottwitz :) You also deserve a "Good soul" badge. :)

For example, which must be many weeks ago, I also upvoted egreg's answers because of reading through his answer collection, and of course the answers are good, so can be upvoted

Not so many in a row, maybe up to about 5 on such occasions.

Cool! :)

At that point some weeks ago, when we heard about removed votes and reputation loss of egreg, the first time, I stopped that -

so now I'm still looking at answers in users's profiles, especially newcomer, but do not upvote more than about 2 answers to not cause trouble

I've lost a few votes some time ago, but misteriously the votes came back. I tried to increase the voting period, but it's quite difficult to me. :)

@PauloCereda Don't bookmark any questions/answers as "to be voted on later". Vote on them only if you stumble upon them. ;-)

@lockstep It's a wise advice. :) I'm trying to follow it. :)

I love some code nonsense: github.com/rails/rails/commit/…

@PauloCereda Did you see the Bumblebee commit thread on github last year? (It is deleted now.)

@AndreyVihrov No. :( Was it funny? :)

@Andrey: Oh my! I found a reference to it! LOL!

@PauloCereda Here's an old copy: web.archive.org/web/20110623080108/https://github.com/MrMEEE/…

@AndreyVihrov Ah thanks! I just found an "abstract" of it. :)

You made my day, @Andrey! :) It's epic. :D

@PauloCereda Too bad pictures are not archived. It was way more funny :-)

@AndreyVihrov haha! :)

@AndreyVihrov "Without /usr Chromium seems a lot faster." LOL.

Hello!

How can I have a figure have its own page, but not at the end of the document? If I use begin{figure}[p], then the figure does get its own page, but it is also pushed to the very end of the document.

@Szabolcs Insert a \clearpage somewhere after the figure (this is not the best solution).

@AndreyVihrov Thank you, but the problem is that it will break the text at the \clearpage, leaving half of a page blank.

I would need to manually figure out where to put the clearpage, which is a lot of work and needs to be re-done after each longish edit

@Szabolcs It's a good question. You should probably ask it on the site. One possibility is to use the afterpage and caption packages and then do \afterpage{\includegraphics{...}\captionof{figure}{caption}\clearpage} Crucially there's no figure environment itself, just the caption.

@Szabolcs I remember now. There is a package that provides a \FloatBarrier command.

@AndreyVihrov placeins: ctan.org/pkg/placeins

Looks wonderful! Thank you everyone!

People are really nice and helpful here

@StefanKottwitz @JosephWright Please ping me if you around, thanks.

@YiannisLazarides Hello

@JosephWright Will you re-open our room please?

@AndreyVihrov I don't think that does the trick either.

@YiannisLazarides It should be open

@JosephWright Are years really not an SI unit? o.0

@Canageek Nope: time is measured in seconds :-)

@Canageek How about 31 megasecond?

@JosephWright Since 1970? :-)

I think Mississippi should be an official time unit too. :)

*wonders if there is a default way of saying L_{other star} but shorter

@PauloCereda Wow. I wonder how many people in this room get that.

@AlanMunn Oops. Too localized? :)

FWIW I did not understand that ^

Neither did I :-)

@AlanMunn I did

I didn't

Oh

Now I do

"One Mississippi, Two Mississippi...."

@AndreyVihrov @KannappanSampath It's supposed to take ~1 sec to say the word "Mississippi", and it's sometimes used to count, especially in (American) sports.

Oh, now I remember seeing this occasionally

@AlanMunn Hah. Now brain glitch deleted! : ) Thank you!

Or when seeing if a thunderstorm is getting closer or further away. I hear "One one thousand, two one thousand" more often.

@AlanMunn The Brazilian version is with "jacaré". :)

@AndreyVihrov I saw it in one of the Simpsons episodes. :) The town of Springfield wanted to enter in the Guinness Book of Records with the highest human tower. The referee said the tower should be at the maximum height for at least 3 Mississippi. :)

@egreg: I tried to play with your solution of this question: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/46877/… . Do you know why the example below doesn't compile

\documentclass{article}
\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{myfonts.sty}
\RequirePackage{expl3,l3keys2e}
\ProvidesExplPackage {myfonts} {2012/03/05} {1}{}
\keys_define:nn { myfonts }
  {
   font .code:n    = \cs_set_eq:Nc \myfont { #1 },
   font .default:n = sffamily,
  }
\keys_set:nn { myfonts } { font }

\keys_define:nn { myfonts }
 {
    unknown .code:n =
           {
              \msg_warning:nnx {  myfonts } { unknown-option }
                                          { \exp_not:V \l_keys_key_tl }

Can some help me with a quickie trouble in TeX?

@KannappanSampath We can try :-)

@JosephWright Thank you. I'd like to center the enumerate structure nested inside a theorem environment. \centering and \begin{center}...\end{center} don't work. :/

@KannappanSampath Doesn't surprise me: lists don't really work that way.

I'd probably try putting the list in a minipage

@JosephWright Sorry. I do not understand what you mean here.

@KannappanSampath Lists, such as \begin{enumerate} ... \end{enumerate}, are 'block structures'. They therefore don't centre. Actually, I'm struggling to see what visual 'centering' you want here.

@JosephWright I'd like the enumerators to be aligned inside rather than at the margin.

@KannappanSampath I'm really not sure how this should look: anyone else?

@JosephWright Something like the above is what I am searching for.

@KannappanSampath Right, give me a second

Reminder: This is happening in Theorem environment if that matters.

@KannappanSampath Something along the lines of

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum} % For filler text
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\begin{center}
  \begin{minipage}{0.6\textwidth}
    \begin{itemize}
      \item The first;
      \item The second;
      \item The third.
    \end{itemize}
  \end{minipage}
\end{center}
\lipsum[2]
\end{document}

seems to be in order: like I said, a minipage will be needed. Getting the width right might be tricky.

What is lipsum?

@KannappanSampath A package of filler text: to save me typing

@JosephWright: It seems to be a bug in the current l3benchmark installation with Makefile. Few minutes ago I ran svn+make and ended in an endless loop ;-)

And, can I use the theorem environment here?

@KannappanSampath Yes

@JosephWright A friend of mine created a lipsum snippet, where lipsum<TAB> expands to the whole text. :P

Thank you @JosephWright @Marco

@MarcoDaniel I'll check

@JosephWright Thanks

It's spelt Raymond Luxury Yacht, but it's pronounced "Throatwobbler Mangrove". :P

@PauloCereda I'd tend to pronounce them 'in full', in the same way that I'd read 'toks' as 'token register'

@JosephWright Me too. :)

@AndreyVihrov Oh my! That's so epic. :)

It would look amazing on a T-shirt. :)

@MarcoDaniel You still have to declare the options.

@egreg How do you mean this?

@MarcoDaniel If there's no \DeclareOption the LaTeX2e package loader doesn't know what to do with them

@N3buchadnezzar LMAO! "- How do you spell <***>, Mr. <***>? - It's as it sounds!" :P

Kinglsey!

@egreg Is there no equivalent in expl3?

@MarcoDaniel You are after \ProcessKeysOptions, I think

@JosephWright @egreg: You are completely right. I didn't look into the documentation of l3keys2e.

\documentclass{article}
\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{myfonts.sty}
\RequirePackage{expl3,l3keys2e}
\ProvidesExplPackage {myfonts} {2012/03/05} {1}{}
\keys_define:nn { myfonts }
  {
   font .code:n    = \cs_set_eq:Nc \myfont { #1 },
   font .default:n = sffamily,
  }
\keys_set:nn { myfonts } { font }

\keys_define:nn { myfonts }
 {
    unknown .code:n =
           {
              \msg_warning:nnx {  myfonts } { unknown-option }
                                          { \exp_not:V \l_keys_key_tl }

Now it works ;-)

@egreg: Now I can suggest an alternative to your answer ;-) ;-) ;-) without using LaTeX2e commands ;-)

@JosephWright Thanks. I didn't have time to look too closely.

I'm not sure if it fits.

@Paulo --- closed.

@IanThompson Thanks for the 5th vote. :)

@AndrewStacey Did Marc van Dongen ever get in touch with you? If not, since he's also easily reachable maybe you should contact him?

@JosephWright Did you ever make that package we discussed?

@JosephWright To do the title page and such without document settings?

Hey all, is there a package that will automatically move all figures to be 1/page at the end of a file?

@Canageek ctan.org/pkg/endfloat

@lockstep Thanks, I knew I'd heard of it

Gonzalo's back and is at 13 from 40000.

@egreg Great news!

@PauloCereda Now 39997

Hi!

@GonzaloMedina Welcome back!

@GonzaloMedina Hi Gonzalo, long time no see. You've been busy I guess.

@egreg Thanks! I see that you're now our first top user! 70K! Impressive! Congratulations!

@AlanMunn Hi, Alan. Yes, I've been really busy.

@GonzaloMedina And you're a small step from 40000.

@GonzaloMedina With good things, I hope.

@AlanMunn Is category theory a good thing for you?

@GonzaloMedina It all depends if the categories are abelian or not. In the latter case they're useless. :-P

@egreg hehe!

@GonzaloMedina Abstract nonsense

@egreg I still laugh every time I read that sentence in Atiyah's book.

@GonzaloMedina Sure. I'm a big fan of syntactic categories. :) I also took class at McGill taught by Joachim Lambek which Michael Barr sat in on.

@AlanMunn That surely was a class to never forget!

@AlanMunn What did Lambek teach?

@egreg It was a very weird class on mathematical methods in linguistics and was co-taught by Lambek and a linguistic prof. It wasn't on category theory per se, but on Montague grammar and Categorial Grammar.

@AlanMunn Seems interesting. Whenever there are schemes, math is involved.

@egreg It was. I seem to recall that the linguists were overwhelmed by the math and the mathematicians were overwhelmed by the linguistics. But I think we all learned something.

The sophistication and subtlety of linguistic problems comes as a surprise to most people.

Well, time to go. Nice seeing you, @egreg and @AlanMunn!

@GonzaloMedina Bye.

@GonzaloMedina You'll be the eighth 40000+ next time you'll be on-line. :)

Hi @Gonzalo! :)

@PauloCereda Hi, Paulo and bye, Paulo ;-) I have to go now.

@AlanMunn Each year I teach some mathematical logic to high school students and I always tell them that "natural language" is ambiguous and it has to be. And, besides, there would be no poetry.

@GonzaloMedina hehe don't worry, my friend. :) See ya! :)