Code. Photos. Excerpts from the life of an engineer.
This week was a great week in terms of chipping away at the Physics countdown. I had an exam on Monday, lectures on Tuesday and Thursday, lab on Wednesday, discussion on Thursday, and finished a homework on Wednesday. With just 2 weeks left to go, we are making good progress to 0-0-0-0-0.
I had a physics test last night in one of the larger of the lecture halls on campus. I think it holds like 700, but there was maybe 350 people there taking the test. Each person needs to sign in (to make sure you are really who you are), and this happens when the TA’s decide. So our course, our physics department thinks the best time to do this is at the very beginning, so there is a mad rush to sign-in, and lines of 175 people on either side of the lecture hall. Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t it be more efficient to have everyone sign-in at the end, as no one really seems to finish at exactly the same moment?
I really don’t like Physics. My second semester here I took Classical Mechanics, which wasn’t horrible. This past fall I tool Electricity and Magnetism, which is when I really started to not like it. And now this semester I am taking Quantum Physics, and I loathe it. It seems so useless! Maybe it’s just me having a hard time seeing the application, or maybe it’s truly because there is no application of quantum mechanics to computer science.
Regardless, I am beginning the countdown to when the homeworks, lectures, labs, discussion sections, and exams will all be done for Physics 214. Lucky enough, it’s not a semester class as with the other physics courses, so I only have 3 weeks left!
How many of you have ever looked at a Math test and wondered, “how did they type this up with all of the funky symbols and stuff. This must have taken hours to make!” Well, maybe only I do. But, I found out how they do do those Math tests, and it’s called TeX.
TeX is a basically a simple little markup-type language that allows you to do really powerful typesetting easily. It involves typing in some code, then using a utility to turn that code into a PDF, DVI, or PostScript file. The TeX code, also known as LaTeX code, is actually quite simple. Let’s take a look at an some examples.
To create a really simple article that has a title, an author, and a date, here is all the code that is necessary:
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\begin{document}
\title{My Article}
\author{Kevin Cathey}
\date{Today}
\maketitle
\end{document}
However, we may want to have more control on our document, like adding margins, so we need to tell TeX that we want more control. We do this by bringing in more commands into the language that TeX has. These extensions are called packages. Anyone can write a package, and TeX has quite a rich environment of them. So to do page margins or other geometric functions, we are going to bring in the package called geometry:
\usepackage[left=0.75in,top=0.75in,right=0.75in,nohead,nofoot]{geometry}
But let’s get to the good stuff. You can do quite a variety of cool mathematical and scientific things in TeX with only one command.
Symbols:
Inserting those crazy symbols is easy with TeX, just write out the name of the symbol and put a “\” before it. The following code will print out quite a different taste of symbols:
We can do all kinds of symbols, like: $\delta, \varepsilon, \Sigma, \gamma, \Gamma, \rho_0, \mu^x$.
With this code, you should notice a few things. First of all, symbols appear between two “$”. This is TeX’s way of saying, “this is an equation”, and then it formats it with the italics and everything, for free! Also, notice that uppercase symbols start with an uppercase letter for the name, and lowercase symbols have lowercase first letters. And finally, if you put an underscore “_” after a symbol, it makes the next character subscript, and if you use a carrot “^”, it makes it superscript. It’s that easy.
Mathematical expressions:
You can also do all kinds of really nifty mathematic expressions like fractions, integrals, etc. For example, let’s say I want to take the integral of some fraction with powers and subscripts and greek letters. I would never be able to do that easily in a word processor, but TeX makes it easy:
$\displaystyle\frac{1}{4\pi}\oint_\Sigma\frac{1}{r}\frac{\partial U}{\partial n} (\frac{\delta_{\kappa^i}}{\varepsilon}) ds$
How about trying to do Schrodinger’s equation in a word processor? Forget it! It TeX, no problem:
- \frac{{\hbar ^2 }}{{2m}}\frac{{\partial ^2 \psi (x,t)}}{{\partial x^2 }} + U(x)\psi (x,t) = i\hbar \frac{{\partial \psi (x,t)}}{{\partial t}}
Conclusion:
I’m just touching the tip of the iceberg here. Basically, TeX acts as a great tool for generating any documents that are going to need advanced typesetting for mathematics or science. If you are a student typing up their homework, or a teacher generating a math test, this technology is a great option. TeX has a great community that has put out modules to do almost anything. To make things easy for me when I write TeX, I use a program on the Mac called TeXShop. I recommend downloading it and at least playing with it. I think you will find it quite fun to play with. For someone who doesn’t like math, it makes it just slightly more enjoyable.
Additional resources:
Mathematical typesetting in TeX.
EquationSheet: pretty much any equation you can think of in TeX code.
Mathematical symbol reference.
Last night it snowed 7 inches here (according to Wunderground). In Wheaton, it snowed 9 inches, and Leslie got a snow day. So I was excited, I thought, there is a chance we will… but alas, this morning I got the following email from our Chancellor:
From: chancellor AT uiuc [edu]
Subject: CLASSES OPEN AS SCHEDULED AT U of I
Date: 1 February 2008 05:57:33 CST
To: everybody AT uiuc [edu]The University of Illinois is open. Classes WILL be held.
Facilities and Services crews have been working through the night to clear
campus streets and sidewalks, and that work will continue today.
I think that wherever I am, the snow and rain and cool storms I want to witness go the other way. Does anyone else experience this? I know that I probably shouldn’t like severe weather, but to be honest, I kind of do. It’s pretty awesome.
There is something about college life and staying up late to work on stuff where at about 11:30 - midnight, you become vastly hungry. At least, one of my roommates Andrew and I do. So last night, we got hungry, and we needed some sustenance. We began scouring the little coupon booklets they send in the mail, and in doing so, we found a deal for Dominoes where if you buy a pizza on Tuesday, you get one for free! “Hey”, we thought, “this is exactly what we want.”
We called them and asked them for their “2x Tuesday” deal, and as a result, we got two large pizzas fresh out of the oven delivered to our Bromley doorstep for the price of one. And anything at that hour of the night tastes good.
But the best part about this is what you do while you eat your yummy midnight pizza. I choose to eat my comestible and work on Computational Theory. In theory and in practice, they are a great combination. 2x Tuesday means more than just two pizzas, it means getting pizza and doing what college students do best on a Tuesday night.
My class list has been tentative for the last week, but now, I have “finalized” it. I have debating if I should try to finish one year early, as opposed to just one semester. Over the last week though, I have finally reached my decision, and am going to stay that “extra” half of a year, and thus just graduate that one semester early.
Any way, my class list (and accompanying descriptions from the UIUC course catalog) is:
It seems like a lot, but it’s actually not going to be too bad. I am most excited about System Programming and Computer Architecture II, those should be sweet. Physics, ugh. Computational theory, ugh.
So tonight, Amanda and Brittany from down the hall straightened my roommate Brett’s hair. Wow, it is pretty crazy! Check out the pictures here.
Just a few hours ago, the BCS announced that the University of Illinois was chosen to play in the Rose Bowl on January 1st against USC. Congratulations U of I! Go upset the Trojans!
Logo © 2007 Tournament of Roses.
This afternoon, my current roommate Andrew Leman, our friend Christian, and myself went to look at a three-bedroom apartment at 1007 W Clark in Urbana. It certainly exceeded my expectations, and was more spacious and well-kept than I had anticipated. The company we are renting from is in the midst of remodeling, so the apartment will even be nicer for next year. If you would like to see pictures of it, check them out here, or visit the Photos page.