To be explicit, a student written article I read around that time said that if you talk to Atiyah, tell him what you think. So I did. But at least in this particular case, it had no effect.
But in fairness, British food, at least the institutional variety, is pretty terrible. The High Table was kind of awful too. Quite indigestible.
@manooooh Well, math people, in my experience, don't give a damn about much of anything except math. It seems to fully occupy their brain cells, leaving little room for anything else.
I must say, he didn't seem like the most interesting person. But then, mathematicians generally don't.
As I recall, I only met him the one time. The Master of Trinity doesn't really mix with undergraduates. I can't even remember why I was at High Table.
Of course, it was a very long time ago.
I also met Andrew Huxley and his wife once. Those people were an interesting example of the literary/scientific English "mafia". They both come from well known families. But I digress.
@UlrikeFischer I can avoid the segfault if I change it to
function otf.featuresprocessor(head,font,attr,direction,n)
local sequences=sequencelists[font]
nesting=nesting+1
if nesting==1 then
currentfont=font
tfmdata=fontdata[font]
descriptions=tfmdata.descriptions
characters=tfmdata.characters
local resources=tfmdata.resources
marks=resources.marks
classes=resources.classes
threshold,
factor=getthreshold(font)
if(factor == nil) then factor=1000 end
print('FACTOR == ' .. factor )
but I know nothing here really. I will try to make a non latex example over the weekend, but possibly my callback code is making some assumptions not valid anymore, and Hand might justifiably say don't use that callback if it errors:-)
@DavidCarlisle there is a curious filetype/file nesting in the code. I'm not getting in which format I must store the file name:
for _,filetype in pairs(
{bibfiles, docfiles, typesetfiles, typesetdemofiles}
) do
for _,file in pairs(filetype) do
cp(file, docfiledir, typesetdir)
end
end
@DavidCarlisle I found I solution. I set supportdir to doc and put it in typesetsuppfiles.
@manooooh You need fairly strong mathematical talent, and an even stronger level of interest. At least, that's my take on it, based on knowing many math people.
And it's not a great career choice, regardless, at least by conventional standards.
Very hard to get a half-way reasonable permanent job unless you are doing really, really well. For some reason there are still relatively substantial numbers of people who want to do math. And there are next to no jobs available for them.
@UlrikeFischer as I say I'm not sure what the factor is doing there, I was trying to work back up the call tree to see where factor first got assigned to be nil, as there it's just being passed in, but it's late (and even later for you:-)
Teaching outside universities isn't great. It's not that good even inside universities.
@manooooh Are we talking school or university? Regardless, poor pay, no respect, and often the work isn't interesting or fulfilling. But different people have different views on this, of course.
If you are doing math, you want to be doing research, mostly.
And that's hard. And getting harder.
Both doing the actual research, and getting paid for it. It's ok for the people who are naturally really good at it. But that's a really tiny number of people.
So, if you are working in a school for the gifted, for example, it could be a relatively positive experience. But I imagine such jobs are quite competitive.
