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nymphomation

If you prefer Neal Stephenson’s Snow crash to his bestseller Cryptonomicon you may have a fun time reading through Jeff Noon’s Nymphomation.

In a
‘parallel’ 1999’s Manchester, blurbflies (blurb stands for Bio-logical-Ultra-Robotic-Broadcasting-System) fill the air chanting their slogans, especially for _DominoBones_, the new lottery game which is on a year trial run in Manchester before going National.

A group of mathematics students are searching for the hidden mysteries behind the game. Their promotor is Prof. Max(imus) Hackle who has written a series of psychedelic sixties papers in a `journal’ called _Number Gumbo: A Mathemagical Grimoire_ with titles like “The No-Win Labyrinth: A solution to any such Hackle maze”, “Maze Dynamics and DNA Codings, a special theory of
Nymphomation” and “Fourth-Dimensional Orgasms and the Casanova Effect.”

He is also keen on using fun-terminology defining processes happening in the ‘Hackle maze’ and as such is a bit like John Conway. In fact, Conway’s Game of Life is a lot like Hackle’s maze.

There is some statistics and game theory in the book but the plot and ending are that of a good Postcyberpunk
novel, that is rather chaotic depending on possible future technological advances rather than the logical and unescapable ending of a good whodunnit.

After reading Nymphomation, a fly or a game of dominoes will never seem quite the same again.

Another nice feature are the non-sensical beginning sentences of every ‘chapter’. To some they seem like the rantings of a mad mathematician. To me they sound like a tribute to Finnegan’s Wake

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fall again

When the leaves start falling, so does the plane Jacobian conjecture,
or so it seems. The comparison is a bit weak in this case as two of the
authors of the preprint posted today at the arXiv A Proof of the Plane
Jacobian Conjecture
are based in Sydney, Australia… A
first glance through the paper shows that it uses Newton-polygons and
the 1975 Abyankar-Moh result on
embeddings of the line in the plane. Techniques that have been tried
before by numerous people in their attempts to tackle the plane Jacobian
conjecture
(the reference to Dean in this wikipedia entry is
outdated, as mentioned in an old blog
entry). Still, the paper just might be correct. As there
are several editors chasing me for overdue referee reports I have no
time to go through the proof in detail, but if you hear more on this
paper or have the energy to go through it, please leave a comment.

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latexrender plugin for wordpress under tiger

Promises and pie-crusts are made to be broken, a wiser man once
said. Still, promises have a much longer life-span and sometimes their
real content becomes redundant over time.

A year ago, I
promised
to document how I got the
LaTeXRender Plugin for WordPress
working under OS X. The procedure
consisted of some trial-and-error operations, installing non-standard
versions of software and hardcoding certain directories throughout
certain files…

Not something I was looking forward
to when I decided to upgrade this WordPress blog but,
surprisingly, things went pretty smoothly this time (Mac-technology
has improved a lot). So, please don’t worry too much about this
post
and follow the (late) instructions below.

First
things first : I will assume you have the ‘generic’ LaTeX
running under Tiger (10.4),that is, use the i-Installer to download BOTH
LaTeX and Imagemagick! Further, in order to get WordPress up and
running, have the standard
MySQL 4.0 package
installed for 10.3 (not version
4.1…) and don’t use the generic Mac-PHP version, but
instead download Marc
Liyanage’s PHP5 package
which has plenty of additional
packages installed (notably, GDlib and MCRYPT which comes in handy if
you want to fight spam-comments using BotCheck).

\r
\n

Download wp-
latexrender.zip
and follow the instructions given to the letter
(there is one undocumented extra directory you have to fill in at the
start of the latexrender-plugin.php file). There is
just one additional thing to do. Find in the
class.latexrender.php file the line starting
with

// convert dvi file to postscript using
  dvips

and include the following lines just before it
:

// begin of workaround // extending the PATH
  environmental variable Soldpath =
  getenv(“PATH”); Swhere_imagemagick_is =
  “/usr/local/bin”; if (Soldpath) { Swhere_imagemagick_is .=
  “:Soldpath”;} putenv(“PATH=Swhere_imagemagick_is”); //
  end of workaround 

activate the plugin and it
should work! Still, there are three things you may want to change. In
the latex.php file uncomment the indicated lines as
you will be using htmlArea to input your posts. In addition, if you
have the MarkDown-plugin enabled, it is best to append additional
lines such as

 Slatex_formula =
  str_replace(“_”,”_”,Slatex_formula);     Slatex_formula
  =
  str_replace(“_”,”_”,Slatex_formula); 

(
between the first ” ” should be the beginning and end
em-tag respectively) or underscores will be interpreted as em-tags.
If you run into additional similar problems, the procedure is to
comment-out the line

 
  unlink(Sthis->_tmp_dir.”/”.Sthis->_tmp_filename.”.tex”); 
  

near the end of class.latexrender.php , look in the
tmp directory for the TeX-file, detect the problem and add similar
lines to the ones above to solve it. Another useful thing to do
is to add TeX-packages in the class.latexrender.php file. My own
version has the following predefined symbols and loaded
packages

 function wrap_formula(Slatex_formula) { 
  Sstring  =
  “\\documentclass[“.Sthis->_font_size.”pt]{“.Sthis->_latexclass
  .”}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage{amsmath}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage{amsfonts}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage{amssymb}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\usepackage{xy}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\xyoption{all}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\vtx}[1]{*+[o][F-]{Scriptscriptstyle
  #1}}\\n”;  Sstring .= “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{C}c}{\\Bbbk}\\n”; 
  Sstring .= “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{C}}{\\mathbb{C}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{Q}}{\\mathbb{Q}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{Z}}{\\mathbb{Z}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbb{N}}{\\mathbb{N}}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\\\newcommand{\\mathbf}[1]{{\\\\text{\\em \\usefont{OT1}{cmtt}{m}{n}
  #1}}}\\n”;  Sstring .= “\\pagestyle{empty}\\n”;  Sstring
  .= “\\begin{document}\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “S”.Slatex_formula.”S\\n”;  Sstring .=
  “\\end{document}\\n”;          return Sstring;     }  
  

which, among other things, allow all commenters to add
quiver-pictures using xymatrix and vtx to depict vertices. Oh yes, you
can allow comments to include LaTeX-code by uncommenting the
line

  // add_filter(‘comment_text’,
  ‘addlatex’); 

in the latexrender-plugin.php
file (but before you do make sure you have spam under control, such as
with BotCheck mentioned above). That’s all for now. If you want
to use TeX in a comment, make sure to put the code between tags [ tex
] and [ /tex ] (omitting the extra spaces). If you want me to add
other LaTeX-packages, leave a comment.

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