I think there might be people out there who think I’m a poet, and I think it’s terrifying. I haven’t been a poet since my middle school days of writing rhyming couplets about hating school and my early high school days of writing terrible prose with line breaks. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure the main reason I wrote so many poems in grade nine was because my teacher seemed to have no idea how to grade poems but very strong opinions about fiction, and I felt like I was terrible at writing fiction and wanted a shot at a decent grade.

In Part 2 of this talk, we gave a crash course to graph theory and showed how we can use it to view some real-world problems as instances of the densest subgraph problem (DSP). But what exactly is the DSP? If you’ve studied graph theory, you may have heard of something called the Maximum Clique Problem. The goal of the max clique problem is to find the largest complete subgraph in a graph. If we consider our vertices to be people, and edges to represent a friendship relationship between two people, in the max clique problem we are trying to find the largest friend group in a community.

Today, I found out that some students at Carleton University have started a “webring” (or well, close enough) for students in computer science and engineering to post their personal websites. (In fact, this blog also joined that webring, and you can find a link to the rest of the pages in the webring here.) I thought this was a really cool idea, so I asked how they came up with it. It turns out that a few other CS and software engineering (+ adjacent) programs in Canada have also started such webrings.

Over the last month and a half or so, I’ve come to the conclusion that I actually don’t know how to read, which is definitely a jarring realization to be having after over 18 years of formal education. Okay, maybe I’m being a little bit cheeky here. I am not literally claiming to be illiterate or even functionally illiterate, and it would be stupid of me to do so, since clearly I am writing this blog post and have written many other blog posts where I reviewed books.

A while ago, someone in a Discord server I’m in asked how much of the math behind a system you need to know to implement it. I thought it was an interesting question, and I felt qualified to answer it, so I ended up writing quite a lengthy response. It just occurred to me that it might also be useful to other people, so I thought I would clean it up a little bit and archive it here.