Maximise sum, Number theory I've got 4 positive integers, a,b,c,d which sum up to 63. The question asks for the maximum value of ab+bc+cd, but I don't get how to do it. I can't find an algebraic method, I can only use trial and improvement. Is there any better method I can use? [This is a clarification of my previous question.]
If a,b,c,d are positive integers with a sum of 63, what is the maximum value of ab + bc + cd ? (By using calculus to solve it)) If $a,b,c,d$ are positive integers with    $$a+b+c+d=63,$$   what is the maximum value of $$ab+bc+cd?$$   I treated this as an optimization problem and tried to solve it but I did not make any progress.
How to read value of variable, where the name of variable is the value of another variable I think an example is in order. Consider I have these two environment variables setup (by a Continuous Delivery tool): PACKAGE_VER=1.2.3 and USE_VERSION_FROM=PACKAGE_VER.  What I want now is a script that can't predict the name of the variable pointing out 1.2.3, only USE_VERSION_FROM. And so, I'm looking for a way to get my script to know the version to use (1.2.3) without knowing anything other than that USE_VERSION_FROM points out the name of the variable that holds the version number.  My naïve non-working first attempt:  #!/bin/bash VERSION_TO_USE="${${USE_VERSION_FROM}}" Confused about the possibility of different differentiable structures. In Loring Tu's "An Introduction to Manifolds" an atlas on a manifold is a collection of coordinate charts that are pairwise compatible and cover the manifold. A smooth manifold is defined to be a topological manifold together with a maximal atlas or differentiable structure. The maximal atlas is constructed by taking an atlas and appending all coordinate charts that are compatible with the atlas and using this he shows that any atlas on a locally Euclidean space is contained in a unique maximal atlas.  He also later shows that for any chart on a manifold, the coordinate map is a diffeomorphism onto it's image.   My question arises when Tu mentions in an aside that every compact topological manifold in dimension four or higher has a finite number of differentiable structures. What I don't understand is how it is possible for a smooth manifold to have more than one differentiable structure. Doesn't the fact that for any chart the coordinate map being a diffeomorphism coupled with the fact that composition of smooth functions is smooth mean that any two coordinate charts on a manifold are compatible and thus they must all belong to one maximal atlas? How is it possible to have another? Am I not understanding the word "maximal" or atlas or some other concept? This is a question that arose in the comments here:   I normally hide footnotes from the TOC by doing this:  \section[title]{title\footnote{This is a footnote.}}.   This works in a lot of document classes (memoir, article, ...), but not in all of them. amsbook, for example, uses the optional argument only for the running heads so the footnote mark still ends up in the TOC. So what is the 'universal solution'? Java String split is not working Interpreting the end of Inception Sorry for the vague title--I don't want the title to be a spoiler.  I've seen the movie three times, and the last two times I looked specifically for clues to this question, but found none.  The final scene in  shows       Cobb's top spinning, as he goes off to be reunited with his children.  The top continues to spin, then the movie ends, without telling us if the top topples--and therefore revealing whether he's in the "real world" or still in a dream. Do we know if he was in a dream at the end of the movie?   I'm assuming the answer is that we simply cannot know.  But did I miss anything?  Were there clues that I missed? Thought Experiment - Poking a stick across a Black Hole's Event Horizon The classical explanation of a black hole says that if you get to close, you reach a point - the event horizon radius - from which you cannot escape even travelling at the speed of light. Then they normally talk about spaghetti.  But here's a thought experiment. What if I have a BH with event horizon radius R such that the gravitational gradient at the event horizon is far too weak for creating pasta. I build a Ring with radius R+x around the BH. Then I lower a pole of length x+d from my ring towards the BH, so that the tip passes beyond the event horizon.  Now what happens when I try to pull the pole back? Show that the countable product of metric spaces is metrizable Hardware issue on iMac, flashing question mark I have an iMac 2008/2009 issue and recently the computer would not boot and I would get a flashing question mark. Ran through all the usual steps, try boot in safe mode, flash RAM,  try single user for fdisk, put in OS disk and boot from CD, etc... No dice.   Replaced the hard drive and put the OS disc in the system, press and hold option. (holding C didn't work) I can see the OS disk but when I click on it the system will act like it is going to run and then freeze. The best I got was the OS X disc that changed the screen to dark grey and told be the system had to restart.  Purchased a usb mount for an external hard drive. Was able to mount the old hard drive to a laptop and run disk utility. Everything checked out.  At this point I am pretty sure it isn't the hard drive.   Any other hard ware items this can point too? My iMAC can also "see" the hard drive (and the recovery partition) when connected via the USB and I hold "option" on start up. But it crashes when trying to boot from either.  I am going to take out and re-install the RAM for giggles but I am not sure what else to do.   Ideas are welcome. I have a one-dimensional array of strings in JavaScript that I'd like to turn into a comma-separated list. Is there a simple way in garden-variety JavaScript (or jQuery) to turn that into a comma-separated list? (I know how to iterate through the array and build the string myself by concatenation if that's the only way.) Creating a DateTime in a specific Time Zone in c# I'm trying to create a unit test to test the case for when the timezone changes on a machine because it has been incorrectly set and then corrected.  In the test I need to be able to create DateTime objects in a none local time zone to ensure that people running the test can do so successfully irrespective of where they are located.  From what I can see from the DateTime constructor I can set the TimeZone to be either the local timezone, the UTC timezone or not specified.  How do I create a DateTime with a specific timezone like PST? How can a singularity in a black hole rotate if it's just a point? I guess nobody really knows the true nature of black holes, however, based on everything I know about black holes, there is a "singularity" at their center, which has finite mass but is infinitely small and thus infinitely dense.  So a black hole is really just a point mass that dramatically warps the space-time around it so that an event horizon is achieved.  What doesn't make sense to me is how a true mathematical "point" can rotate, or at least how it is even possible to determine if a point is rotating (or if it should even make a difference about whether or not it is rotating, for the same reason it would be impossible to tell if a perfect, featureless sphere were rotating (I know it would have higher rotational energy but lets assume you can't measure that because a true "point" can't attain rotational energy since it has no radius)).  The only conceptual solution I have to describe a rotating black hole would be to compare it to a rotating whirlpool, where the surface of the water is the fabric of space-time... but this is different because there is no "singularity" in a whirlpool that causes the water around it to rotate, whirlpools form from flow of water around a point (put into motion perhaps by some kid swirling water in a 2-liter bottle... it's due to an external cause), but the only thing that could cause rotation around a black hole would be the singularity itself, which doesn't make sense because, once again, how can we know if a true point is actually rotating?  Aside from everything I've said, here is what I am actually asking:  Why/how do some black holes rotate... what is the mechanism of their rotation (is analogous to a spinning point or a 3-d whirlpool, or something different)? In his 1984 paper , Paul Holland raised one of the most fundamental questions in statistics:     What can a statistical model say about   causation?   This led to his motto:     NO CAUSATION WITHOUT MANIPULATION   which emphasized the importance of restrictions around experiments that consider causation.  Andrew Gelman makes :     "To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it."...There are things you learn from perturbing a system that you'll never find out from any amount of passive observation.   His ideas are summarized in .  What considerations should be made when making a causal inference from a statistical model? Prove that $\sqrt[n]{n!}$ is increasing and diverges I have to prove that $a_n$ is (strictly) increasing and diverges  $a_n = \sqrt[n]{n!}$ ;  n $\in$  $\ \mathbb{N}$  From sequence I see that $a_n$ increasing to infinitive.  $\sqrt[1]{1!}=1 ,\  \sqrt[2]{2!} \approx 1.41, \  \sqrt[3]{3!}  \approx 1.81 ,...,  \sqrt[n]{n!} $ What blocks can Endermen pick up and what blocks they can't? Why does my shell script choke on whitespace or other special characters? Or, an introductory guide to robust filename handling and other string passing in shell scripts.  I wrote a shell script which works well most of the time. But it chokes on some inputs (e.g. on some file names).  I encountered a problem such as the following:   I have a file name containing a space hello world, and it was treated as two separate files hello and world. I have an input line with two consecutive spaces and they shrank to one in the input. Leading and trailing whitespace disappears from input lines. Sometimes, when the input contains one of the characters \[*?, they are replaced by some text which is is actually the name of files. There is an apostrophe ' (or a double quote ") in the input and things got weird after that point. There is a backslash in the input (or: I am using Cygwin and some of my file names have Windows-style \ separators).   What is going on and how do I fix it? Why do we think of light as a wave? I've read that light travels in a straight line and has a wavelength of 400nm to 700nm. But I don't understand why does it have a wavelength and what creates its wavelength? I agree with the concept of sound which also has wavelength, thus called sound waves which are created by the vibrational movement in air. I'm not aware of calling light a wave. Does the light vibrate too? If so, then how? How long does it take for DNS records to propagate? How do I set a custom resolution? I tried to use xrandr to set 1680x1050 as a new mode to VGA output, but it says:  sudo xrandr --addmode VGA-0 1680 X Error of failed request:  BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes) Major opcode of failed request:  140 (RANDR) Minor opcode of failed request:  18 (RRAddOutputMode) Serial number of failed request:  35 Current serial number in output stream:  36 How can I synchronize my two Mac Computers? Strip HTML from Text JavaScript