Incredible dedication to indexing in Kleinberg & Tardos.

@anna nice! I’ve always appreciated a solid index!

To those who are interested in the 1984 entries:

On page 633 they discuss the development of interior point methods, following the work of Narendra Karmarkar in 1984, page 810 contains the associated bibliography entry, and page 811 contains the bibliography entry for the English translation of Levin's paper on Universal Search Problems.

I don't know why 1984 is the only year with an index entry. I can only assume it's an Easter egg.

#Search #ComputationalComplexity #1984 #Algorithms #ProfessorLife #EasterEgg #AcademicMastodon #AcademicChatter

@anna only two code comments? I guess they leave them in the main part of the text rather than code its self.

@emily_s They don't really include comments in the pseudocode, but in this case, "//" apparently signifies elements of a list that have already been processed in a merge operation. This is the diagram on page 49. The other one is similar.

@anna what book is this? IS it *Algorithm design*? https://a.co/d/03Vmps7Y

@0rkk0 ooooh yeah

@anna OK, but have they made the K&R joke?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/b9db36/the_original_edition_of_kr_the_c_programming/

@anna

It's like the Oxford English Dictionary's entry for "water". Which goes on for •pages•....

@cavyherd I think it was this recent episode of No Such Thing As A Fish in which they briefly discussed Emily Brewster discovering a new meaning of "a(n)": https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/no-such-thing-as-gutter-ice/id840986946?i=1000747203795

Couldn't quickly find an original source for that claim, tho.

#Podcast #NoSuchThingAsAFish #nstaaf #Dictionaries #Language

@anna

“The map is not the territory.”

Kleinberg & Tardos: Hold our beer.

@anna

English is so weird....

@cavyherd especially sad that very, very few people will ever look up "a(n)" in a dictionary, and even fewer read the entire definition of it, yet it takes months to write those entries...

@anna

There is •so much work• like that that take ages to create, years of knowledge & experience to inform, that most people just never even see....

@rk but: they only put a single number in the index!

@anna

…well now I gotta know which number. There are quite a lot of them.

@rk it's in the picture that I shared

@rk see also: https://mathstodon.xyz/@anna/116080411694715008

@rk @anna the ZX81 manual (Vickers, 1981) also has an index for all the non-alphabetics.

@edavies no