POV: you need a break from your vacation so you attend a seminar about a cool new paper at your old university. 🤓

paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3776643

preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05162

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@anna I always teach my students that when they make a list in their paper or presentation, all items on the list have to be in the same category, or of the same type. Might file this one in the “bad examples” folder 🤷‍♀️

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Devastated to discover that there is only one Trekkie among my students, and he hasn't even watched Voyager.

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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.

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RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@anna/116039387860261479

Wah it is Monday morning for sure!

Was lucky enough to make it to Delft train station, got my bike, raced to the office. When I arrived, it turns out that all the lifts were out of order, so I had to drag myself, my backpack, my big textbooks, and my sports bag up 5 flights of stairs.

After dropping off everything I didn't need, I wanted to leave my building so I could go to the building where my lecture was, only to find that the *door* was out of order.

Arriving at the lecture hall, I discovered that my Acrobat reader had died, so I had to uninstall and reinstall. That finally done, I had my slides up on the big screen and started my lecture, only for my laptop to crash when I tried to navigate to slide 2.

While it rebooted, I improvised the first part of my lecture without slides. The lecture hall was super cold, so I wanted to get tea, but the machine wasn't working...

After all the train and laptop problems I had on Friday, I can hardly blame Monday morning for this, but still 😳

At the end of the lecture a lot of questions from students that started with "Sorry, you probably covered this, but I missed the first part of the lectures because my train wasn't running..."

Students were cool, tho, so that was nice!

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Great. Took a 7:15 train to get to the office on time so I’d have some time to re-read my notes and set up my laptop etc before teaching a lecture at 8:45, but because of a “power failure” there are no trains between The Hague and Delft, so now I’m sardined into a delayed street, and will, in a best-case scenario, run sweatily into the lecture hall at 8:45 sharp 😩

At least there is a streetcar, I guess.

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My student walked into my office and stared at the open copies of Russell & Norvig and Kleinberg & Tardos on my desk, with a look of shock and horror on their face, and then went: Do you have time to read all of that‽

I mean... given the notes scribbled in the margins and the bookmarks sticking out of my books, I can hardly deny that I've read at least parts of them in quite some detail. If I admit that, however, my students are no longer going to buy the "sorry I don't have time for an extra meeting" line...

Anybody have a good comeback for me for the next time this happens? This time I just went with "er... that's kind of the idea of studying... that you read your textbooks..." 🤦‍♀️

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