I am pursuing masters degree in computer applications. I have no formal Mathematics and Physics background but for masters degree entrance examination I have studied senior high school level Mathematics with some introductory college level Mathematics like multi-variable calculus, advance linear algebra etc but that was 2 years back.  In my personal opinion computer programming is a monotonous work which is making me bored and from past 2 years (after studying mathematics)and I have a strong urge to self learn Mathematics and Physics.  Maths is prerequisite for both computing especially advanced topics (Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence etc) and Physics so I have decided to cover these Mathematical topics first  1. Linear Algebra by using   2. Trigonometry by using   3. Coordinate Geometry (Need Recommendation for book to cover this topic)  4. Calculus (Confused which book to use Thomas' Calculus or Stewart's or some other)   And finally  as my first physics book  It will take a lot of time to cover all this therefore I don't want to make any mistake in selecting wrong text for a newB. Can you help me by recommending some good books which i can use with or instead of books mentioned above and a suitable strategy to attain the goal in parallel with my regular studies.
What are the best textbooks to read for the mathematical background you need for modern physics, such as, string theory?  Some subjects off the top of my head that probably need covering:   Differential geometry, Manifolds, etc. Lie groups, Lie algebras and their representation theory. Algebraic topology.
how to get output of a script/program into a file? I am writing a small KOMA-Script scrartcl document with multiple sections. In the table of contents, LaTeX fills the current line with dots between the end of the section name and the page number. Is there any way to customize this behavior? I would like to reduce the space between the single dots (i.e. use more dots in the same space). What kind of questions can I expect to see on a qualifying exam? First time player in a group figuring out things as we all go.  I just hit level four as a Ranger, and I get to improve one ability score of my choice by 2, or I can increase two ability scores of my choice by 1.  My first thought was Strength, as I've been rocking a score of 11 with a mod of +0 so far. But I read that Rangers use (wisdom mod + 10) for their spell casting modifier. Currently my wisdom is 13, with a mod of +1. If I increase either STR or WIS, will the modifier increase as well? How and why?  A Monk in our party went from 9 CON to 11 during their ability score improvement, and by doing so their modifier went from −1 to 0.  We're all pretty new, so between eight people we're currently sharing one book, and all trying to locate our own copies for later campaigns. That's making it… inefficient for us to learn these things quickly. Why don't languages raise errors on integer overflow by default? In several modern programming languages (including C++, Java, and C#), the language allows  to occur at runtime without raising any kind of error condition.  For example, consider this (contrived) C# method, which does not account for the possibility of overflow/underflow.  (For brevity, the method also doesn't handle the case where the specified list is a null reference.)    //Returns the sum of the values in the specified list. private static int sumList(List&lt;int&gt; list) {     int sum = 0;     foreach (int listItem in list)     {         sum += listItem;     }     return sum; }   If this method is called as follows:  List&lt;int&gt; list = new List&lt;int&gt;(); list.Add(2000000000); list.Add(2000000000); int sum = sumList(list);   An overflow will occur in the sumList() method (because the int type in C# is a 32-bit signed integer, and the sum of the values in the list exceeds the value of the maximum 32-bit signed integer). The sum variable will have a value of -294967296 (not a value of 4000000000); this most likely is not what the (hypothetical) developer of the sumList method intended.  Obviously, there are various techniques that can be used by developers to avoid the possibility of integer overflow, such as using a type like Java's , or the  keyword and  compiler switch in C#.  However, the question that I'm interested in is why these languages were designed to by default allow integer overflows to happen in the first place, instead of, for example, raising an exception when an operation is performed at runtime that would result in an overflow.  It seems like such behavior would help avoid bugs in cases where a developer neglects to account for the possibility of overflow when writing code that performs an arithmetic operation that could result in overflow.  (These languages could have included something like an "unchecked" keyword that could designate a block where integer overflow is permitted to occur without an exception being raised, in those cases where that behavior is explicitly intended by the developer; C# actually .)  Does the answer simply boil down to performance -- the language designers didn't want their respective languages to default to having "slow" arithmetic integer operations where the runtime would need to do extra work to check whether an overflow occurred, on every applicable arithmetic operation -- and this performance consideration outweighed the value of avoiding "silent" failures in the case that an inadvertent overflow occurs?  Are there other reasons for this language design decision as well, other than performance considerations? Quickly calculate date differences If I put my phone on my notebook's left corner, it shuts down. Can anybody give me reliable explanation as to why this is happening?? A Google search spewed forth millions of hits on how to find tables without clustered indexed, the PK normally being the clustered index of a table. However, a table could easily have a natural key as a clustered index, and a non-clustered surrogate index, like an identity column.  How do I find all tables in a DB without a primary key defined? I have 245 tables in this DB: manual inspection is grossly inefficient. Would it be possible to break an RSA key, in for example 1 week of time, if the cracker have already spent X number of years building an index of primes by performing every permutation of existing prime keys up to $2^{2048}$?  I understand this would take an immense amount of time to do, but it would only be done once. Obviously, computing such an index would take a considerable amount of time and would have to be done with someone having the right amount of resource. Given the public key, you would be able to look up what the two primes are, and hence retrieve the private key instantly.  Breaking an 256 AES would then be easier, as AES keys are often generated using the RSA private key.  Would it be possible to build such an index? How long would that take in permutations and perhaps with the fastest computer in the world? Can Debian identify rarely used packages? I'd like to find a tool that could tell me which Debian packages on my system have been rarely or never used, perhaps by looking at file lists and access times.  This is to find candidates for deletion from my nearly full hard drive.  I'm not very well informed about the rich ecosystem of desktop GUI tools (I use aptitude); does anyone know if one of those tools, or any other tool, can identify how recently a package has been used? What 70s (60s?) TV show / TV movie had a generation ship whose inhabitants did not know they were on a spaceship? I have the vaguest memory of a TV show (maybe a BBC import?) in which the protagonists were moving through the sections of a massive generation ship whose inhabitants had forgotten that they were on a spaceship... I know there was an RPG with the same plot (which, after all, is a pretty great blank slate) but I definitely feel I saw this on a static-filled 13" B&amp;W TV back in the day... Question Staging SE Been a few blogs on , and I get the point. However, would a staging SE help solve some of these issues like community overlap. I understand , but how can someone not yet a part of a community know to do so. Some of the point of SO is that you often don't know what to ask exactly, and we help clear that up. So, I wonder, rather than &quot;playing hot potato&quot; would it be useful to have a site that's simply for temporarily holding questions and such.  It would be the alternative to migrating to another site where you dump all responsibility on that site. This area, all communities are responsible for. It would be a good place to ask a question if you don't know where to ask. The blog I linked talks about phrasing to a specific audience. For someone that doesn't know, the audience is better at selecting which questions are directed at them. As SE grows, the amount of communities will mean more overlap. Right now it may be reasonable to expect people to be able to predict the best community, but will it always be that way?  Some restrictions:  It would be accessible by all communities. The question could be edited, but not answered. The question could be exposed to more easily tracked/understood/etc. automated janitorial work.  Just a helpful thought. Install suspension forks on non-suspension bike How do I include lines in resolv.conf that won't get lost on reboot? I have finally migrated to 12.04 from 7.10. I have one last part to complete but I am stumped. I am using Puppet on each server, and in the past I have included a nameserver address and a search domain name for the puppetmaster in resolv.conf.   search puppetmaster.com nameserver 192.168.1.XXX   In 12.04 resolv.conf gets overwritten when rebooted. I cannot use a static IP for these, so using the /etc/network/interfaces to help me out is a nill point.  # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8) #     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN nameserver 127.0.0.1   Is there a way to get resolvconf to handle this either in the head, tail or base? If there is, are there any examples I can use to tweak on my server.   Any help is much appreciated. `sudo echo "bla" >> /etc/sysctl.conf` permission denied Disclaimer: I'm pretty novice at sysadmin stuff.  I'm trying to set up port forwarding in an AWS EC2 instance, this has to be done in the command-line because I don't want to go in and edit anything, it has to be automatic (it's part of a build process).   sudo echo "net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1" &gt;&gt; /etc/sysctl.conf      Permission denied   The weird thing is I've been (successfully) using sudo for pretty much every command that required su privileges. If I do sudo su before the command (trying it out by hand in an ssh session), then it works.  Reasons behind this? Possible solutions that don't involve sudo su or manual edits? How to avoid the 'not properly formatted as code' alert Is it possible to detect, on the client side, whether the user is using an encrypted page or not?  Put another way -- I want to know if the URL of the current page starts with http or https. How to tell a lambda function to capture a copy instead of a reference in C#? I've been learning C#, and I'm trying to understand lambdas.  In this sample below, it prints out 10 ten times.  class Program {     delegate void Action();     static void Main(string[] args)     {         List&lt;Action&gt; actions = new List&lt;Action&gt;();          for (int i = 0; i &lt; 10; ++i )             actions.Add(()=&gt;Console.WriteLine(i));          foreach (Action a in actions)             a();     } }   Obviously, the generated class behind the lambda is storing a reference or pointer to the int i variable, and is assigning a new value to the same reference every time the loop iterates.  Is there a way to force the lamda to grab a copy instead, like the C++0x syntax  [&amp;](){ ... } // Capture by reference   vs.  [=](){ ... } // Capture copies I thought of this question right after I posted a tweet about a service upgrading me to a free student account since I am in college. I said "That really helps a broke college student out." I actually paused for a second while I was writing that to decide if I should say     That really helps out a broke college student.   or     That really helps a broke college student out.   Are there any prescriptive rules about splitting phrasal verbs like this? I know this breaks the "don't put a preposition at the end of a sentence" rule, but that "rule" has an exception for phrasal verbs.  To clarify:   Is there any rule that says phrasal verbs can't be split, even if it is just an imposed, prescriptive rule? Does splitting a phrasal verb to put a preposition at the end of a sentence fall under the phrasal verb exception to the prepositions at the end of a sentence rule? Using dconf-editor I tried enabling   org -&gt; gnome -&gt; nautilus -&gt; list-view -&gt; use-tree-view     but even after the check box is selected, plus a reboot, it still doesn't switch to the tree view on the side bar.  In previous versions of Nautilus / Ubuntu the side-pane-view setting used to be in the window-state section (which is now missing)    I'm I missing something, or is there no way to enable Tree View on the side bar in 14.04?  Is there a way to manually create the missing entry back in window-state ?