Why do we call things like this a function
Why $f(x) = \sqrt{x}$ is a function?
I have a background in QFT, GR and differential geometry at the level of a master student in theoretical physics. I would like to touch the area of CFT. I know the textbook of Philippe Di Francesco. It may be too big for the beginner like me. Are there some good introductory lectures or textbooks adapted to the needs of beginners? How to disable automount in nautilus's preferences I am using Ubuntu 11.10 (64 bits) and I do not want to mount automatically USB thumb drives in my system. I tried the command dconf-editor and gconf-editor but there isn't the icon to disable it in nautilus preferences (apps|nautilus|preferences|media_automount).  Thanks. I am given two charged particles of same charge at a distance of $r$. They initially apply force $F$.  Now an infinite dielectric (of dielectric constant $4$) of width $\frac{r}{2}$ is introduced between the particles. What will be the new force?   I find this problem confusing because I have only been told about forces when its either fully dielectric or fully vaccum given by Coulomb's law. How do we get forces when only partial space is dielectric? How to customize the Ubuntu Live CD? Testing points in PCB This dreaded issue started at some time after upgrade to OS X (Yosemite) 10.10.3. accountsd uses about 60% CPU constantly, making the laptop hot and noisy.  I'm not using iCloud at all.  Killing it doesn't help, because it starts again quickly.  Probably related question, but it's about iOS: I am under DDoS. What can I do? This is a  about DoS and DDoS mitigation.   I found a massive traffic spike on a website that I host today; I am getting thousands of connections a second and I see I'm using all 100Mbps of my available bandwidth.  Nobody can access my site because all the requests time out, and I can't even log into the server because SSH times out too!  This has happened a couple times before, and each time it's lasted a couple hours and gone away on its own.  Occasionally, my website has another distinct but related problem: my server's load average (which is usually around .25) rockets up to 20 or more and nobody can access my site just the same as the other case.  It also goes away after a few hours.  Restarting my server doesn't help; what can I do to make my site accessible again, and what is happening?  Relatedly, I found once that for a day or two, every time I started my service, it got a connection from a particular IP address and then crashed.  As soon as I started it up again, this happened again and it crashed again.  How is that similar, and what can I do about it? MacPorts fails to find 'make' I've installed Xcode and MacPorts on a brand new mid-2013 MacBook Air, but MacPorts doesn't work, saying that it cannot find anything.  mba:~ cnst$ sudo port install wget Warning: The Command Line Tools for Xcode don't appear to be installed; most ports will likely fail to build. Warning: See http://guide.macports.org/chunked/installing.xcode.html for more information. ---&gt;  Computing dependencies for wgetError: Unable to execute port: can't read "build.cmd": Failed to locate 'make' in path: '/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin' or at its MacPorts configuration time location, did you move it? mba:~ cnst$   And, indeed, there is no make or clang in the path, but it is definitely installed, though:  mba:~ cnst$ find /Applications -name "clang" -or -name "make" /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/clang /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/lib/clang /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/make mba:~ cnst$   Why is there no make or clang in the path?  Why MacPorts doesn't work?  I notice that  mentions that you have to install something from ADC, Apple Command Line Developer Tools, but ADC doesn't work since last Thursday or Friday due to their security breach, so, the developer tools are nowhere to be found.  What's the proper solution here? How can I import Opera bookmarks into Chrome? Why is foo.hasOwnProperty('__proto__') equal to false? Limit problem arctg (1 ^ infinty) Can anyone help me with this limit problem without L'Hopital rule and Taylor series? $$\lim_{x\rightarrow\ -\infty}\left(-2\frac{\arctan(x)}{\pi}\right)^x$$ Inequality with exponents $x^x+y^y \ge x^y +y^x$ Let $x,y$ be positive numbers. Prove that $x^x+y^y \ge x^y +y^x$.   This question appeared in Summer 1991 Russian Olympiad team test. Apparently, I tried to come up with different approach such as Jensen, Karamata's inequality and nothing works so far. I just need a discussion here. Hints are not necessary. How to use \graphicspath? I am using MikTex 2.9 and TeXstudio for my TeX preparation. I would like to set the path to my figures folder, which contains all the figures, plots etc. required for my work.   I used \graphicspath to set the directory, but it gives me an error message:  \documentclass[12pt]{article}  \usepackage{graphicx}  \graphicspath{D:/LATEX/Reports@IIT/figures}  \begin{document} \includegraphics[width=4.5cm,height=4cm,angle=0]{logo.jpg}  \end{document}      Error: Package pdftex.def Error: File `logo.jpg' not found   However, when I prepend the filenames of the images with the same path in the \includegraphics command, it works just fine:  \documentclass[12pt]{article}  \usepackage{graphicx}  \begin{document}  \includegraphics[width=4.5cm,height=4cm,angle=0]{D:/LATEX/Reports@IIT/figures/logo.jpg}  \end{document}   Why is \graphicspath not setting the path? Windows 10 - disable reopening programs after restart/startup Occasionally, a forced restart is happening on my Windows 10 computer. When the OS is restarted every program that I've had prior to the restart is reopened at startup. The programs are reopened like I would just double-click them.  I usually hold 5-6 windows of Visual Studio and few more programs all together. When the above happens, I have to wait several minutes until I can start working, as everything takes ages to load.  Is there a setting to disable these programs from automatically opening at startup? Why do I get a segmentation fault when writing to a "char *s" initialized with a string literal, but not "char s[]"? Material setings in properties window is missing How to make two people play at the same time? My brother owns Skyrim on steam. We use Steam Family Share, but we were wondering how both of us could play it at the same time? Expanding an event group shows more events than labeled when there are new events How to draw arrows between circled coefficients of polynomials using tikz After reading Gonzalo's answer to , I thought  I would be able to modify it so that I could have the corresponding coefficients circled and an arrow going from one circle to the next. For example, I would like the coefficient of x^2 on the left, a, circled and the coefficient of x^2 on the right, 5 circled, then a curved arrow drawn between the two circles. How might I achieve this? Also, how would I add some text along the path of the arrow? I reproduce his code here.  \documentclass{article} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{tikz} \usetikzlibrary{calc}  \newcommand{\tikzmark}[1]{\tikz[overlay,remember picture] \node (#1) {};}  \begin{document}  \begin{equation}   a\tikzmark{a}x^2 + bx + c = 5\tikzmark{b}x^2 + bx + c.   \begin{tikzpicture}[overlay,remember picture,out=315,in=225,distance=0.4cm]     \draw[-&gt;,red,shorten &gt;=3pt,shorten &lt;=3pt] (a.center) to (b.center);   \end{tikzpicture} \end{equation}  \end{document} Let $f\colon X\to\overline{\mathbb{R}}_{\geq 0}$ be a measurable function. Show that     $$ \int f\, d\mu=\int\limits_0^{\infty}\mu(\left\{x\in X: f(x)&gt;t\right\})\, dt. $$     (The right integral is to be read as an Lebesgue-integral.)      Hello, my idea is to approximate $f$ by the functions $$ f_n:=2^{-n}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{\infty}\chi_{\left\{x\in X: f(x)&gt; k/2^n\right\}}. $$  With this approximation by simple functions I got $$ \int\limits_X f\, d\mu=\lim\limits_{n\to\infty}\int\limits_X f_n\, d\mu=\lim\limits_{n\to\infty}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{\infty}\frac{k}{2^n}\cdot\mu\left(\left\{x\in X: f_n(x)=k/2^n\right\}\right)\\=\lim\limits_{n\to\infty}\sum\limits_{k=1}^{\infty}\frac{k}{2^n}\cdot\mu\left(\left\{x\in X:f(x)&gt;k/2^n\right\}\right) $$  This is the point where I do not come along anymore... is that right to this point and if yes: How can I continue in order to get the desired right side?  With regards