Math Jargon for November

November's math jargon:

supremum, sup - simply a jargonista way of saying "least upper bound"
sufficient statistic - concept introduced by Fisher in 1920, refers to a function of a data set that summarises all the sample information in that set. want more precision, and a chat about Rao-Blackwellisation? Go here.
Goldbach conjecture - if n>4 is even, then n is the sum of two odd primes (can be rephrased: even numbers >4 are the sum of two odd primes). The conjecture is named after Prussian mathematician Christian Goldback.

Math-programmers are also well-advised to know ALL the greek letters used in mathematics (commonly forgotten or under-used ones are eta, kappa, nu, upsilon (looks like nu), psi).

Object Oriented Numerics Libraries

Nice index of libraries
http://www.oonumerics.org/oon/

The Art of Mathematics

An interesting BBC video on dynamical systems, created by Lasse Rempe of the University of Liverpool.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7617191.stm

An interesting introduction to dynamical systems is David Luenberger's Introduction to Dynamical Systems: Theory, Models and Applications. (David is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford and has published lots of articles in journals like "IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control" and "SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization").

Here is an interesting edition of the IEEE Automatic Control journal focusing on Systems Biology.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isYear=2008&isnumber=4439798&Submit32=Go+To+Issue

The GSL

http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/

GNU Scientific Library can do FFTs, solve differential equations and least squares fitting amongst other things.

Numerical Programming using Haskell and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler

ghc 6.8.3 - the Glasgow Haskell (Optimising) Compiler. Downloaded from haskell.org. Requires more memory than Hugs but programs it produces run much faster. GHC's developer website contains all the bugs/proposals etc present in GHC. Haddock, a doc-generator for Haskell is worth checking out. Pleasantly, the Windows installer adds ghc.exe to your PATH.

Haskell is one of the purest functional languages around. It tries to avoid using state and mutable data, and instead works by evaluating expressions. This lack of state can make it a difficult language for implementing numerical algorithms.

Still -there's no harm trying! Here some interesting papers on this subject - including one that creates some functional codes for quantum mechanics. Also worth keeping tabs on Haskell's mathematics library listage.

The Use of Super in Python

Read THIS "super" article from Artima.

And the NIFTY vs HARMFUL argument HERE.

Cryptography and the Swedish Connection

This post relates to a question that arose as I was debugging a Python program using pdb. I wrote a small program which was spending most of its time inside sre_compile.py (via pickle.py -> re.py -> sre_compile.py). I looked inside sre_compile.py and found this was "Secret Labs'" regular expression library. So who are Secret Labs and do they have anything to do with cryptography?

This website is the home of Secret Labs AB. They are based in Sweden and have been working with Python since 1997. AB stands for Aktiebolag ("stock company"). Did you know SAAB is actually short for SA Aktiebolag?