Necessarily, a machine learning class uses math (which is one of the reasons I'm taking it) and so I'm thinking about How People Think About Math. This would be a good thing to work on anyway - someday I really hope to get back to that Hofstadterian AI research track - and so here I am, thinking.
Here, by the way, are some neat Javascript tools for learning and working with math. One spinoff of all this is that I'd like to do something that generates things like this - kind of like a big Javascript Excel generator. That's something I've wanted to do for a long time, actually. So we'll see how well I do on that subgoal.
But the larger goal is this: when working with mathematical functions, we typically have a boatload of different representations floating around. Typesetting is done in TeX, of course, but there also has to be a more semantically-oriented form that's useful for tossing to Mathematica/Maple/Octave/whatever the heck you're using (and that includes expressing it as Python or C or Perl).
But the key is this: underlying all that, there is a semantic structure that is the actual equation or expression. That is what I want to approach. And in fact it's an area of active research (of course) - most of which is behind paywalls. Thanks, Springer-Verlag! But searching on names still turns up fascinating links [OMDoc]. If I only had all the time in the world, I could start reading arbitrary numbers of interesting papers. (I'm actually more interested in building a research tool to support the reading of arbitrary numbers of interesting papers in a more efficient manner. But that's a story for another day.)
As far as I can tell in half an hour's search, the state of the art for representing mathematical semantic structures appears to be MathML or something more or less like it. Yeah, XML as serialization, which makes my eyelid twitch, but hey, there you go.
I'll get further into this as the class progresses, of that I'm sure.
Update: OpenMath is the thing I'm looking for.
No comments:
Post a Comment