Concrete Mathematics

[red floyd]

"I'm not a manager, I work for a living."

What's the line from the movie? "You don't call me 'Sir'! I'm a
sergeant! I work for a living!!!!"

 

[arnuld]

hey folks,

It's really amazing. I just solved the exercise-13 in
chapter-1 of "Concrete Mathematics". i thought i will never be able to
do that but i did, & yes straight through the "homework execise"
skipping warmups completely. WOW!. Paul Graham's principle really
works. Paul Graham said:

"if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to
draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I
can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means,
I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person
off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly
could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly
far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring
failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves
people say "I can't." (1)

well, now i came to know one thing:

"there are no miracles in ordinary lives & Isaac Newton, Alexander,
Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci were ordinary men.".

if something feels too complicated at first sight, then remember your
brain will take some time to immerse into that special type of
thinking. work *hard* & take your time for that. when i tried Concrete
Mathematics for the 1st time, it was just WOO-HOO! & this WOO-HOO!
existed for 5th time too. now i am understanding Knuth's theories,
slowly.

but i am not going to do CM becuase that is *not* my need. today i
picked it up with the intention of understanding it & solving a
problem, not to mention only for the pure enjoyment of it. i have other
needs, for now. i need to learn C++, LISP, Algorithms, Data-Structures,
learning about OSs, so that i can settle for a god job/business after
contributing some time to FSF. All of this was feasible because of you
*folks*, you gave me clarity on the role of CM in becoome a good
programmer & removed the fog of confusion from the front of my eyes. I
owe many thanks to you.


special thanks to "Noah Roberts".

-- arnuld


(1) see www.paulgraham.com