Does anyone use LaTex and/or Lyx?

[dmeyer]

Yeah I'm lucky I get it free from my college, same story with Matlab and tons of other software. I also use Sage predominately with notebook() for checking my work. I am hoping that Cantor (the awesome kde frotend) will get support for rotating the 3D graphs etc. so that I'm not limited to a single perspective - I heard its being worked on.

Matrices are absolutely incredible. With matrices and linear algebra generally, the thing that catches people most is that they keep trying to map everything in their head to something they can visualize. After 4 variables all hell breaks loose and they get flubergasted.

[GreyGeek]

Yeah I'm lucky I get it free from my college, same story with Matlab and tons of other software.

Ya, they borrowed that business model from the dope dealers .... the first hit is always free. After one gets addicted the price climbs out of sight.

I got my Mathematica at a professor's discount when I was teaching Physics, Calc & DE in college. When I started my own consulting business I knew my "discount" wouldn't help and they confirmed it. One of my tasks was to create a land leveling program that would out-perform commercially available packages. They were using brute force and would loop through their calculations, storing "solutions", for about 20-30 minutes, and then present the "best" one they found. I developed a least squares solution, using Pascal on Apple, to a three dimensional 1st order model, populating the matrix array, which could take the same data and spit out the exact solution in a fraction of a second.

I also use Sage predominately with notebook() for checking my work. I am hoping that Cantor (the awesome kde frotend) will get support for rotating the 3D graphs etc. so that I'm not limited to a single perspective - I heard its being worked on.

+1

Matrices are absolutely incredible. With matrices and linear algebra generally, the thing that catches people most is that they keep trying to map everything in their head to something they can visualize. After 4 variables all hell breaks loose and they get flubergasted.

It really starts getting fun when you have matrices within matrices, a sort of Bessel function of functions. I used Linear Algebra in some experimental Neural Nets I wrote about 15 years ago, when I was investigating artificial Intelligence, and Neural Nets were promoted as the solution. My own experience with them showed to me that they were just glorified hashing functions.

[woodsmoke]

dmeyer.

Thankee.

I wish that my jc would use Linux. We actually teach a full bore Linux associates degree, but the college can't get good people in IT for the amount of money they have available to pay. There used to be a couple of people that were Linux gurus in IT and they went to lengths to make the inter/intra net, etc. compliant with Firefox etc. But they left and now the IT people are firmly entrenched in Windblows.

I posted a humourous thing in another thread but will repeat it here.

I took a ppt made in Impress into the jc the first day of classes on a cd so that Windblows can't say it has errors and replace slides with white ones, and the cd wouldn't load. So I called IT, they brought down a "program" cd and since it was full then the drive saw it.

I only had a few files in a folder on my cd.

They said, in front of the jcs Dean that Linux didn't "close the cd" properly. I replied that it had been "closed properly" and that it opened on two computers at home and had opened the week before at the jc.

They still said it was a problem with Linux.

After a while I got the player to recognized the cd and it did open.

So I e-mailed them that I thought the problem was the physical drive itself.

So, they replaced the drive and asked my to open the cd and it opened first thing.

They still think that "Linux didn't close the cd properly" though!

And I will mention to the students that CalTech uses Linux.

woodsmoke

[dmeyer]

Its not all students that use it but a decent enough number too, although I may have a skewed view as a lot of my friends were CS majors.

[woodsmoke]

decent number is better than no number! lol

woodsmoke