Archive for the 'sicm' Category

Mathematical Books

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

I went to the library today to check out Munkres’ Topology, because I am interested in listening in 18.901 next fall. I couldn’t find it except on Reserve, so I checked out some lighter readings:

I got the Spivak’s books because Gerry Sussman recommends Calculus on Manifolds in Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (SICM), where he mentions that his notation is inspired from Spivak’s.

The term is coming to an end…

Monday, May 19th, 2008

This term was a lot of fun. Specially Sussman’s class. In fact, I liked it so much that I am thinking of taking his other class next term (the idea of expressing a physical theory as an unambiguous computer program really appeals to me). Then, for my second class, which has to be in Systems (and unfortunately, there isn’t that many options next fall!), I hesitate between Operating Systems and Computer Architecture. I feel Computer Architecture might be more useful in the long run, specially for someone like me who hasn’t taken a solid undergrad class in architecture. However, I heard it’s boring, and Operating Systems is sure to be more fun (though probably more time-consuming!), as I’d get to write my own operating systems from scratch in the labs.

On to achievements:

  • In Sussman’s class, my team and I had a really great time on the final project. We used the great book Building Problem Solvers (my Amazon review) as a base to implement a debugger for metabolic networks, BioHacker.
  • In my research, I finally released my work as a real product, Micado. The latest feature I’ve added is automatic control inference & generation, though this is still not officially included yet.

Now, I only have my film music exam on Wednesday. I don’t think I’ll study much for it. Instead, I’ll be reading a few books: