I have just finished the first draft of my blog book for 2009, under the title of “An epsilon of room: pages from year three of a mathematical blog“. It largely follows the format of my previous two blog books, “Structure and Randomness” and “Poincaré’s legacies“.
There is still some amount of work to be done on the texts; for instance, I need to create an index (which I had neglected to do in the previous two books in the series), and will probably end up splitting the book into two volumes (as was done for “Poincaré’s legacies”).
As always, any feedback or comments are very welcome.
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8 February, 2010 at 12:08 am
math_reader
Great book again, thanks!
A typographical remark: sometimes the text seems to be centered when not intended. The first such page seems 379, then pages 382-390, then starts again second paragraph of page 392, stops top of 393, starts a little middle of 393, stops again then a long run 395-416, then again 418-… It’s very strange.
8 February, 2010 at 7:37 am
Ben Green
Terry,
Looks great, though shouldn’t there be three volumes this time?
Ben
8 February, 2010 at 10:26 am
other
somewhere in the middle everything got center aligned
8 February, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Blake Stacey
Check p. 351, the quotation from Jerry Bona: “The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn’s Lemma?” The quotation is centred, but the centring doesn’t stop afterwards.
8 February, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Blake Stacey
The table in section 2.7, “Create an epsilon of room”, is going off the right-hand edge.
8 February, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Blake Stacey
As is the one on p. 441, following the line, “For instance, here is how the data set tracks with Benford’s law (rounded to three significant figures)”. The table on p. 443 has extraneous quotation marks in the second column.
8 February, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Blake Stacey
In equation 3.32 (p. 445, following the text, “Observe (through telescoping series) that Benford’s law implies that”), the words “for some integer” are run together, maybe from using \rm with unescaped spaces.
8 February, 2010 at 10:40 am
Anonymous
Professor Tao: Thank you very much for giving us this compilation (as well as the other two). I’m just very happy to have these blogs in one place where I can quickly search for things I want to read. Wonderful!
8 February, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Blake Stacey
It’s not really an “error”, but it might be nice to add “equidecomposable” to the LaTeX hyphenation dictionary, as it sticks out into the margin several times (I’m looking at the Banach–Tarski paradox article, pp. 318 ff.). The same thing happens with URLs, e.g., the “terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/01/08” at the end of that section. The url package provides a \url command which might help (if you’re using pdflatex, otherwise I think breakurl is necessary).
8 February, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Blake Stacey
The footnote on p. 348, in the sentence which begins, “For instance, once one can demonstrate the existence of an uncountable ordinal”, refers to the “axion of choice”. Dark matter physics is hard enough without adding Banach–Tarski to the mix. . . :-)
8 February, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Terence Tao
Thanks for all the corrections! I managed to fix most of them. For some reason \hyphenate{equi-de-com-pos-abil-ity} does not do anything about the compound word $G$-equidecomposablity; I don’t know how to fix that. Also, \usepackage{hyperref} caused a huge number of compilation errors so I was not able to take advantage of \url. But in any event the publisher will presumably have professional typesetting to deal with these issues in a better way than I can…
8 February, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Antonis
I think the problem lies with $G$- and not with equidecomposablity. You could try to “manualy” hyphenate the word with \- at the appropriate place.
8 February, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Blake Stacey
There might be some quirky “feature” deep within TeX which doesn’t like having two hyphens in the same word. Antonis‘ suggestion with regard to a discretionary hyphen sounds as good as any.
Ah, yes, having an actual publisher probably makes a difference! I’ve been doing an awful lot of LaTeX work lately for various print-on-demand niche publications, so I tend to forget about things like that. (-:
11 February, 2010 at 11:41 am
konradswanepoel
Try $G$\nobreakdash-\hspace{0pt}equidecomposability. Then latex will break decomposability as it usually does (or as overrided with \hyphenate{}). Generally, hyperref should be the last package, but it does not work nicely with some other packages, for example with the cite package.
11 February, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Terence Tao
Ah, that worked, thanks! It will appear in the next round of revisions of the ms.
9 February, 2010 at 4:45 am
An Epsilon of Room « Information Flow
[…] I’ve put my paper-reading obsession on hold for a second after discovering Tao’s “An Epsilon of Room“, chronicling the third year of his incredible […]
12 February, 2010 at 6:48 am
Anonymous
Minor remark for log-convexity of L_p norms (Lemma 1.11.5): the algebra is a bit different in the last (complex interpolation) proof on p. 184, revise “specialising to s:=\theta”.
[Corrected, thanks – this will appear in the next revision. – T.]
12 February, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Return to LaTeX | neverendingbooks
[…] better than Terry Tao to teach me a more proficient way of blogging? A few days ago, Terry announced he will soon have his 5th (!!) book out, after three years of […]
12 February, 2010 at 2:18 pm
tomer
“Mathematical blog” – now that’s an expression you don’t hear everyday.
good work