Math

Ancient Geometry and Insights into the History of Mathematics, by Brent Byars.

And a great list of links: Websites relevant to the History of Mathematics, by David Wilkins.

Und eine Reihe von Biographien bedeutender Mathematiker an der Uni Göttingen.

Lebensbild: Felix Klein.

Merkt man, daß ich heute nur in Sachen Examensarbeit im Web unterwegs bin?

Writer as Weblogger

Neil Gaiman, author of Neverwhere and Good Omens (together with Terry Pratchett), has a weblog! I just finished reading Neverwhere last month, and I love Good Omens, so it’s pretty interesting to read the author’s weblog. (I wish Tad Williams had a weblog, too. But I guess he’s too busy…)

Link via MetaFilter.

Endspurt

I’m still alive. And I still have a bit of work to do with my thesis, but I hope to be able to finish my last chapter today, and get a few odds and ends done on Monday.

I wanted to get it all done yesterday, but like Garret and Al, I had one of these days where you can’t seem to get anything done.

In a fit of ‘Heck, I have to get something done before the day is over’, I started to fiddle with the layout of my thesis at around 11pm. I wanted headers with lines under them, so I changed the document class to something that did what I wanted. Now the headlines looked ugly, so I went through the definitions of the new style and changed them to what I wanted.

Now I thought I had it just right – but suddenly the page numbers appeared in the footer instead of the header. Okay, so I changed to ‘hand-made’ headers and tried to include the page numbers manually – only to find out after one hour of desperate trying that the new layout didn’t allow for the page numbers to be in the header. And there wasn’t even a good reason for this! The author wrote something like ‘I thought it was a good idea to put the page numbers in the footer since the poor thing would be so sadly empty otherwise.’

So I went back to the original layout, and now I won’t have lines under my headers. Oh well. I guess having or not having lines below the headers won’t affect the grade I’ll get for the thesis.

After three hours, all I really changed was – nothing. Well, almost.

Today is going to be different. I will finish the last chapter, and I will add captions to my graphics, and I won’t waste any time. Yeah.

Have a great sunday, everyone!