BYU Prediction Contest 2013: The Return of Parrot Head

[lambdacoug]

Euclidian Distance is just an obscure way of saying Pythagorean Theorem (in N dimensions). Though, I must say the equation looks much more intimidating, LaTeX FTW!

[pelagius]

Euclidian Distance is just an obscure way of saying Pythagorean Theorem (in N dimensions). Though, I must say the equation looks much more intimidating, LaTeX FTW!

Here is the LaTeX source (well, I made the formatting slightly different than the image):

\begin{align*}
d(p,q) = d(q,p) &= \sqrt{(q_1-p_1)^2 + (q_2-p_2)^2 + \cdots + (q_n-p_n)^2} \\
                &= \sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^{n}(q_i-p_i)^2}
\end{align*}

[Indy Coug]

Does latex give you more flexibility?

[pelagius]

Does latex give you more flexibility?

Yes and no. You can write down virtually anything mathematical (and usually you can do it easily and fast if you know what you're doing) but it is not a good idea to try to control the very fine details of the formatting (like the space between operator and variables, let LaTeX do that for you ... its type setting engine is very good). Another advantage is that you can write mathematics very fast once you're good at it.

I write virtually everything in LaTex including my course notes/slides/decks.

[Indy Coug]

Yes and no. You can write down virtually anything mathematical (and usually you can do it easily and fast if you know what you're doing) but it is not a good idea to try to control the very fine details of the formatting (like the space between operator and variables, let LaTeX do that for you ... its type setting engine is very good). Another advantage is that you can write mathematics very fast once you're good at it.

I write virtually everything in LaTex including my course notes/slides/decks.

Can it do actuarial notation?

[pelagius]

Can it do actuarial notation?

I would guess yes. But that feature would have to be implemented in an extension package someone wrote (there are tons of extension packages ... well, LaTeX is actually an extension of base TeX).

[lambdacoug]

Can it do actuarial notation?

(La)TeX is very strong in mathematical notation in general. I would be surprised if it did not manage actuarial notations, though I have no experience with that. I assumed pelagius just copied the Wikipedia equation for Euclidian Distance, it's awesome he didn't. Mediawiki's mathematical notation is fed through (La)TeX's equation formatting. I used it extensively for my classwork at BYU and for documenting my.ray tracer source code, which is why I'm familiar with Euclidean Distance. Optimizing it for billions of distance calculations between objects is not trivial, but immensely fun.

[lambdacoug]

I would guess yes. But that feature would have to be implemented in an extension package someone wrote (there are tons of extension packages ... well, LaTeX is actually an extension of base TeX).

TeX is an amazing piece of software by an amazing computer scientist, Donald Knuth.

[lambdacoug]

Yes and no. You can write down virtually anything mathematical (and usually you can do it easily and fast if you know what you're doing) but it is not a good idea to try to control the very fine details of the formatting (like the space between operator and variables, let LaTeX do that for you ... its type setting engine is very good). Another advantage is that you can write mathematics very fast once you're good at it.

I write virtually everything in LaTex including my course notes/slides/decks.

(La)TeX can be frustrating if you want absolute control over layout. It is amazing at typesetting and producing professional and academic documents. Doing the same formatting with Word is seriously tedious by comparison.

[Lost Student]

Bump. Is it kosher for someone other than pelagiu$ (I have no idea why DDD adds the dollar sign, btw) to start the predictions thread? I'm ready to make my prediction!

(hint: )