On June 30, 2010 Donald Knuth announced iTeX, the successor to TeX. His announcement was an extended parody of much of what people recommend as the “right” way to develop software.
TeX has been extremely successful. The vast majority of math and computer science is published using TeX. And yet Knuth implies that TeX would have been an obscure failure if he had developed it using trendy software development techniques.
Here’s the video of Knuth’s presentation.
Here’s something called a theoretical computer science cheat sheet. I don’t know whether I agree with the name, but it’s a nice cheat sheet.
The first two pages of the cheat sheet have to do with sums, combinatorics, and recurrence relations, the kinds of things you’d find in Concrete Mathematics and certainly useful in theoretical computer science. The chart mentions the “master method” that I blogged about here. But a large part of the cheat sheet is devoted to calculus and other general mathematics not as directly related to computer science.
There’s a nice summary of finite calculus on page 8, a useful little area of math that’s not very widely known.
Thanks to Bill the Lizard for pointing out the cheat sheet.
