Mircea Neacsu wrote:
Reminds me of a book I used to have about abstract algebras. Every time I was feeling too smart for solving a really difficult problem, I would read a page from it and go: "Nah, still dumb!"
That's hilarious. Really made me laugh out loud, because I have a book like that too and I'm just going through my annual reading of it (I only read about 2 pages of it every year). It's Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming[^]. I was really motivated to get through a lot of it this year and then I got to the bottom of the 3rd page or so...
Knuth said:
Algorithm E may, for example, be formalized in these terms as follows: Let Q be the set of all singletons (n), all ordered pairs (m, n), and all ordered quadruples (m, n, r, 1), (m, n, r, 2), and (m, n, p, 3), where m, n, and p are positive integers and r is a nonnegative integer. Let I be the subset of all pairs (m, n) and let Ω be the subset of all singletons (n). Let f be defined as follows:
:-O :-O :sigh: