Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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posted: 9:57:49 AM |
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Georges Gonthier applies formal methods in a new proof of the four-color theorem.
Why should the non-mathematician care about things of this nature? The
foremost reason is that mathematics is beautiful, even if it is, sadly, more
inaccessible than other forms of art. The second is that it is useful, and
that its utility depends in part on its certainty, and that that certainty
cannot come without a notion of proof. Dr Gonthier, for instance, and his
sponsors at Microsoft, hope that the techniques he and his colleagues have
developed to formally prove mathematical theorems can be used to "prove"
that a computer program is free of bugs—and that would certainly be a
useful proposition in today's software society if it does, indeed, turn out
to be true.
(Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.) posted: 9:57:49 AM |
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Tonight's free preview went pretty darn well. We had perhaps 40 in the house, and a few misty eyes at the end. I flubbed two light cues and the actors dropped half a page of dialog, so we can't call it flawless, but we have a show ready for a paying audience. I released my inner Nazi on Neil, who tried to give a cue to my sound techs as I was opening the house, and I used up my diva fit points on Rich (in absentia), who unborrowed the coat racks that we'd taken from the lobby for storing costumes. Sharon and Martha got their introduction to the overhead vacuum sweeper (from the drugstore upstairs) in the middle of their scene. There are nine scenes in this play, and a unit set, so from the booth most of this play is about getting actors and props on- and offstage in the dark or in ghost light. So I have to be able to see that the actors are where they should be in that same demi-dark. I'm doing everything I can to bump up my night vision: I've turned off my desk lamp; I've taped over the green light on the ready light unit; I even (to the surprise of Neil and Eileen) cleaned the booth window, which looked like it hadn't been scrubbed for several years. posted: 12:27:28 AM |
 D. Gorsline, Proprietor
   
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