Entries from Stephan Paukner

I got the Christensen-book on Friday. The 3 new books I own now cost the hell of €241.59! Well, others buy a plasma TV, I buy mathematical literature.

Apropos: I’ve set up a time plan for working up the basics of functional analysis. Until the end of January, I want to recall properties of metrical and topological spaces as well as basics of measure theory, using my script of Prof. Cigler’s lecture about functional analysis and the book “Functional Analysis” by Werner. After that I want to go through the first seven chapters of the mentioned book until the end of March; chapter IV should be done by the end of February. I’ll have to go through about 6 pages per day, I think this should be possible.

In April I want to start doing Gabor analysis, and finally the topic of my thesis should be fixed in May.

Today I went to HGFei to receive three books: Gröchenig’s “Foundations” and HGFei/Strohmer’s “Gabor Analysis” and “Advances”; the first two are now my property, the third one is just a lend. I also ordered a copy of Christensen’s “Introduction”. I want to buy these books because of their high quality and their good aptitude as introductory literature, and I like to write down notes *into* books, which isn’t quite possible for borrowed copies.

We had a short talk about further proceedings. My task now is to read a lot. In two or three months I should have a good enough overview about the topic to be able to say what direction is most interesting for me. As final target, Christmas 2006 should be a reasonable date for the master exam.

One part of my thesis could be to do some “quality assurance” and documentation of the NuHAG Matlab toolbox. Also, I think I should create a port for Octave.

I bought the MathTimeProfessional fonts for LaTeX from PCTeX, Inc. and plan to combine it with Monotype Baskerville for the actual print of my thesis.

I’m still finishing to read the introduction chapter of HGFei’s book, after which I want to get myself familiar with some basics of Functional Analysis again, such as properties of , , , e.a.

Today I went to Prof. Baxa and showed him my exam reports. Although there were some “Gut” (“good”, i.e. B’s) among them, I cleverly combined them with some “Sehr gut” (“very good”, i.e. A’s) to get an average of “Sehr gut” in most cases. Topology will be my only “Gut” in the master exam report. But that’s OK, as I can’t call myself a very good mathematician.

Anyway, all in all I have finished the second part of my study with “Ausgezeichneter Erfolg” (“outstanding success”). All that’s missing now is a master thesis and the master exam.

Three months have passed since September, but I continued reading on the Short Introduction to Gabor Analysis by Feichtinger/Strohmer some time ago. Also, I did around a bit with Octave. I borrowed two books (Christensen, Blatter) from the NuHAG Library. Unfortunately I forgot to look for a copy of Gröchenig. As one of the next things I want to check out the NuHAG MATLAB toolbox and the PDFs about the basics of Fourier Analysis, the links of which HGFei sent me some time ago.

Also, I finally collected all exam reports and will hand them out to Prof. Baxa, together with the exam pass. The meeting with Thomas K. is still up to come, but I want to wait until I really understand what we’ll be talking about.

I got myself a “Super Multi DVD ReWriter”, namely the LG Electronics GSA-2166D, an external DVD burner using a USB 2.0 interface. I plugged it in and could use it immediately with GNU/Linux thanks to udev and the kernel modules scsi_mod, sr_mod (for SCSI CD-ROM drives) and usb_storage.

I want to use DVD-RAM as backup media, and it really works like a charm: I could create an ext2 filesystem on it by simply issuing the command

after which I could mount it and use it like a harddisk. The only drawback is when a large amount of data is written, the kernel is still busily writing data for up to 15(!) minutes after the copy process has finished in the user space!

Be careful when using such media with autofs. I experienced that when I simply began to copy data to /misc/dvdram without explicitly mounting the media before, autofs reaches its timeout during the transfer, which leads to a currupt filesystem. The manually executed e2fsck failed, all files went into lost+found!