Category Archives: academia

Teaching

Posted on November 19, 2012 by gautshen

“If teaching is reduced to mere data transmission, if there is no sharing of excitement and wonder, if teachers themselves are passive recipients of information and not creators of new ideas, what hope is there for their students? If adding … Continue reading →

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Reversing a list in Haskell

Posted on October 23, 2011 by gautshen

Totally bored and jobless over this surprisingly silent weekend, I decided to revisit some of the Haskell programs that I had written when I took the Functional programming course during the previous year. While I was at it, I remembered … Continue reading →

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Fun with Limit languages

Posted on October 18, 2011 by gautshen

Given an alphabet the set of all finite words over is denoted by . The set of all infinite words over is denoted by . For any infinite word let denote the set of all prefixes of . For a … Continue reading →

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Pebble Games

Posted on July 7, 2011 by gautshen

In these past few days, I have been reading Martin Grohe’s survey on Finite Variable Logics in Descriptive Complexity Theory. There I encountered a very interesting concept known as pebble games. These are used to characterize equivalence between structures in … Continue reading →

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Why a netbook doesn’t work for me

Posted on December 6, 2010 by gautshen

A few months ago, before joining CMI, I wrote a post soliciting advice on purchasing a new laptop for my graduate school. Having considered many options, I decided to purchase an Acer Aspire One netbook. The reason behind this purchase … Continue reading →

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Quitting my Job and restarting my education

Posted on August 8, 2010 by gautshen

I quit my job as a Linux Kernel Engineer at IBM on July 20th 2010 to enroll for the Integrated Ph.D program in Computer Science at the Chennai Mathematical Institute. I will be working in the area of Theoretical Computer … Continue reading →

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Laptop Purchase: Advice Please!

Posted on July 9, 2010 by gautshen

I am going back to being a student starting this august. First thing that struck me was that I will have to return my company provided laptop, a Lenovo T60p which has been my constant companion for the past 3.5 … Continue reading →

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The Earth Hour – From light to darkness.

Posted on March 26, 2010 by gautshen

This afternoon, I received quite a few emails about the “Earth Hour”. Mostly forwards from friends and relatives and corporations such as HSBC, asking me to pledge my support for this cause. The text in one of the e-mails ran … Continue reading →

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JEST done

Posted on February 21, 2010 by gautshen

I took the JEST-2010 (Joint Entrance Screening Test) today. Institutes such as the Institute of Mathematical Sciences Chennai, and now apparently even the Chennai Mathematical Institute shortlist candidates for their MSc and PhD programs based on scores of this test. … Continue reading →

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Congrats Sripathi

Posted on March 29, 2009 by gautshen

Yesterday while I was at my cousin’s place, I chanced upon to see this item in Deccan Herald, issue dated 27/03/2009. Sripathi and I were classmates from 4th standard all the way upto 2nd PUC. But more than just classmates, … Continue reading →

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