More ... Into the Wild of Coding!
25 Jan 2015This time, I got a bit closer to the purpose and the passion behind all this workout. The Entry Scene of Mathematics.
Yet! This is going really crazy. It’s not been too long I wrote similar description of my excitement I’ve been drawing from this world of Programming. I listed there all things “coding” that became my favorites on the way. I have more to share here.
Somebody told me,
When you acquire new knowledge, do not despair and get carried away!
I can see now why he repeatedly told me this.
Ever since I chose to enter this ‘magnus’ and magnanimous world of programming and open source, I only get to become more speechless, at times go horribly paranoid, at every momentary ‘bit’ of information I pass by.
It looks to me as if this is all just one mankind’s attempt from one tiny planet in this whole universe to create one entirely new world.
I have been dwelling my way for - not out of choice though - a secure and thrilling career in my current field of corporate communications. Perhaps, this is what everyone of us struggles to achieve in terms of their career, “secure and thrilling”. The only difference is how strategic and disciplined their struggle is.
I think when your educational qualifications do not match with your profession, you are surely bluffing yourself in each passing minute. Among the past (education) and the present (profession), you will end up respecting only either of them from the bottom of your heart. Because education (especially along with the learning component ;-) is something that affects you how most addictions affect you. Something like smoking! As long as you do not know how it tastes or feels like, you are fine!
At my current work space, I keep trying to fiddle with my communications tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, where a bunch of colleagues around me, much younger than me, take their joyful and frustrating rides through coding. Whereas my work does neither frustrate me, nor excite. What frustrates me is that I don’t belong on the other side. The world of technology. When colleagues sit to talk at a casual occasion about their struggle in getting their python script to parse a whole genome sequencing data or something like that, I feel like an alien (if not like sitting among aliens – same thing anyway).
All these feelings have nothing to do with the field I am in. It is like sitting in a foreign land with native stigmata on the face. And the reason as I found through numerous sleepless nights is not that my current field is not exciting. There are so many things that excite me within corporate communications such as social media branding, competitive analysis, etc. But I still cannot claim that identity because I have already tasted something totally unrelated to this field, The Science!
Whether my skills accept it or not, I want to identify myself only with science. Paradoxically, I realize I am not as bad a stranger in this field as I think. Given my educational qualifications in strictly basic sciences, Math, Physics and Chemistry, I am certainly not a stranger here. I just needed to go to the next level. My new zeal in learning programming inspired me to re-establish my old “complicated” relationships with Mathematics and Physics.
I was reading Joe’s Introduction to regular expressions and it reminded me of the traditional Set Theory in mathematics. RegEx phrases look like set theory expressions. Some thing like writing
“{3x2+2a | x in Z & a in R}”
to describe,
a set of numbers of the form 3x2+2a such that all
xbelong to integers and allabelong to real numbers.
I found a lot of other elementary-level obvious connections between programming and math. So, I chose to learn programming while refreshing my math. I am currently spending at least a couple of hours each day trying to read some intro articles on elementary algebra, find roots of polynomials or memorizing essential differentiation formulas and work on writing stupid scripts for such problems in Jupyter Notebooks (previously IPython Notebooks).
If Max Tegmark says that this universe is entirely made up of mathematics, it must be true! Because this thesis has been challenging our imagination from as back in time as when Pythagoras simply said,
All things are numbers!
When I hear this word, mathematics, my heart either skips a beat or raises its speed. I am not sure what’s in this subject that does only two things to us: it either attracts us or repels. Whatever it does, it does it very strongly. The impact it creates on our minds is too deep and inescapable.
In this whole attempt, I got to know Joe of JoeQuery, who helps me by paving a learning track for me in python as a step toward Scientific Computing, my long-term goal. And my brief visits to myriad websites and google searches on topics spanning math, programming and python, I now know something called SAGE.
SAGE, System for Algebra and Geometric Experimentation, is an extremely powerful Python programming environment meticulously designed for mathematics. I went on knowing about SAGE Math Cloud where I can do n number of things-__‘math coding’__ on cloud. I also learned about SAGE Notebook environment which is similar to Jupyter Notebooks, especially the much anticipated Jupyter Hub. I came to know SAGE Interact which contains “Inspire Me” stuff, a bunch of super-scientific examples of what you can do with SAGE. This is similar to Matplotlib’s Gallery.
Just one of Joe’s blogs led me into several other very interesting posts by him, such as:
- What is a function?
- More intro to RegExp
- A book titled Set Theory for Computer Science
- Intro to Logic in 3 parts (Link-1, Link-2, Link-3)
If this whole finding is a work of just about two days, I am not able to imagine how many more other things are out there, where should I begin for my seemingly ambitious endeavor of scientific computing and what should be my strict path to reach there?
Some of the interesting and most generous Math & Coding resources I came across: