What Are the New Methods and Notations in Differential Geometry?

[ric peregrino]

How did you find PF?

Google search.

Hello,

I'm an old fart, that used to self study GR and tensor calculus. I have a BS ECE from UCD, and a MS EE from Stanford. I've since retired from my electrical engineering career which was mostly at the old HP's Stanford Park Division, and I find myself once again pondering these things. I see a lot of new methods and notation, that I'm not familiar with, namely differential geometry, and hope to continue to learn.

Cheers,
Ric

 

[phinds]

Welcome to the forum from a fellow old fart retired EE. You've come to the right place.

 

[DeBangis21]

Welcome to PF.

 

[ric peregrino]

Ah, the old N queens problem. At UCD, I goofed and burned all my time on a 1 thread Burroughs mainframe, which happily burned all my assigned CPU time and then errored out. I had to go to the prof and ask for more CPU time, and I was then able to get the desired solution for 8 queens. One student had a very elegant, short, recursive solution to the problem, which I don't recall in detail, except that it was a very small number of lines of code, compared to my brute force 8 nested loops approach.

 

[berkeman]

At UCD, I goofed and burned all my time on a 1 thread Burroughs mainframe,

The B6700 in the basement of Storer Hall? That's the machine I learned Fortran and Pascal on, in some intro programming classes around 1977 at UC Davis.

 

[phinds]

The B6700 in the basement of Storer Hall? That's the machine I learned Fortran and Pascal on, in some intro programming classes around 1977 at UC Davis.

Wait ... a Borroughs mainframe had FORTRAN and Pascal??? I thought they only had AlGOL, which is what I learned on them in 1962 -> 67 (so maybe they added them later --- I'm pretty sure the one I used only had ALGOL).

I remember it had a lot of "morning sickness" 'cause every damned time they turned it back on a tube or two would burn out. They could have avoided that by running it 24x7 but as I understand it, that would have resulted in an electric bill that would have been approximately the gross national produce of Guatemala.

 

[ric peregrino]

Ya, good times! I think we used Pascal, about 1980.