pm215 Wrote:I do occasionally find cool Japanese stuff in Oxfam shops; not very often but just enough to make me keep checking.

I got it from the Oxfam Bookstore near the British Museum in C.London. It seems to be the place where many Japanese students dump their books before they go home, so it's a veritable treasure trove. Also found Minna no Nihongo book 1 and workbook 1 in the same shop for £5 each.

pm215 Wrote:I'm currently wading through Linuxカーネル徹底理解 (not from Oxfam) which can't seem to decide whether it wants to be serious "how do the internals work?" or lightweight "how do you use these features". Definitely easier to deal with the language when it's telling me something I already know, though :-)

yeh, Japan Centre (Picadilly Circus) sometimes sell their old magazines, so I picked up a few Japanese Linux mags and retro video game magazines! Such a cool resource for unusual words...but still way above my level

Actually I think you need to get out of the gaijin bubble here and ask this on 2chan or some other Japanese forum/yahoo questions etc.
Not that you won't find anything useful here...


edit: Actually I quite enjoy the fact that people here embrace math, programming and all kinds of various things here. It's not just a bunch of linguists who hate math etc.

Usually the university students who study Japanese in classes whom I know almost all hate math, don't understand it or feel somehow distant from it.

jettyke Wrote:Actually I think you need to get out of the gaijin bubble here and ask this on 2chan or some other Japanese forum/yahoo questions etc.
Not that you won't find anything useful here...


edit: Actually I quite enjoy the fact that people here embrace math, programming and all kinds of various things here. It's not just a bunch of linguists who hate math etc.

Usually the university students who study Japanese in classes whom I know almost all hate math, don't understand it or feel somehow distant from it.

Most of the time, the reason they hate it is because they don't like it(interest). I know a lot of people who take language courses but hate it. I can abide by this, when I was younger I had to take french. Even though I didn't like it. What did I get out of it? Nothing, I can't even form a sentence even though taking it for 9 years lol.

Saw this in Lawson yesterday. Seems to have very mixed reviews, though.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E9%9D%A2%E7%99%...4569791174

JimmySeal Wrote:Saw this in Lawson yesterday. Seems to have very mixed reviews, though.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E9%9D%A2%E7%99%...4569791174

this book has preview lucky (look at a few pages inside the book)

I liked this one: http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4797341378

It's less about how to do basic arithmetic but more about what makes math interesting.

Irixmark Wrote:Not sure why anybody would want to do calculations in any other than his/her native language, but when it comes to actual math, Japanese math books for senior high school and university students are awesome. Really no surprise the country has produced so many great statisticians and mathematicians working on probability.

Why is it I can't think of any famous Japanese mathematicians other than Itou?


http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4797341378

Looks cool, I might get it

dizmox Wrote:Why is it I can't think of any famous Japanese mathematicians other than Itou?

Heard of Kakutani's fixed-point theorem? Akaike Information Criterion...? Admittedly all rather applicable rather than pure.

I know Akaike, but for some reason it never registered in my mind that the name is Japanese.

I guess I vaguely know of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teiji_Takagi too...

Well as a math tutor i can suggest you http://www.youtube.com/user/GuruBix you can get solution to all kind of math problems. It gives you detailed description for step by step procedure.

Irixmark Wrote:

dizmox Wrote:Why is it I can't think of any famous Japanese mathematicians other than Itou?

Heard of Kakutani's fixed-point theorem? Akaike Information Criterion...? Admittedly all rather applicable rather than pure.

One year on I retract what I said now. But it is kind of true that there hardly seem to be any famous Japanese mathematicians pre 1900.

5 months from now I'll have to attend graduate mathematics lectures in Japanese... will I cope I wonder. D:

Irixmark Wrote:Heard of Kakutani's fixed-point theorem? Akaike Information Criterion...? Admittedly all rather applicable rather than pure.

Applied mathematicians are just engineers, scientists, and statisticians who wish they could be real mathematicians.

vileru Wrote:Applied mathematicians are just engineers, scientists, and statisticians who wish they could be real mathematicians.

... and economists are just failed applied mathematicians.

But as an outsider who consumes and uses the occasional applied result, how are Japanese universities in pure (rather than applied) math?

dizmox Wrote:One year on I retract what I said now. But it is kind of true that there hardly seem to be any famous Japanese mathematicians pre 1900.

isn't pre-1900 the isolationist days? (at least pre-meiji, pre-black ships.)

my japanese history is weak but i thought before meiji, japan was largely seen as technologically behind. this makes their rise to militant empire and subsequent war recovery efforts really impressive as far as industrialization, etc.

kainzero Wrote:

dizmox Wrote:One year on I retract what I said now. But it is kind of true that there hardly seem to be any famous Japanese mathematicians pre 1900.

isn't pre-1900 the isolationist days? (at least pre-meiji, pre-black ships.)

my japanese history is weak but i thought before meiji, japan was largely seen as technologically behind. this makes their rise to militant empire and subsequent war recovery efforts really impressive as far as industrialization, etc.

Well, yeah. I guess the academic culture wasn't there then, and the most famous mathematicians tend to be from those days when there were more low hanging fruits to put one's name on.

Quote:But as an outsider who consumes and uses the occasional applied result, how are Japanese universities in pure (rather than applied) math?

Probability is a strong area. I think there's a lot of good algebraic stuff going on too.

dizmox Wrote:(...) tend to be from those days when there were more low hanging fruits to put one's name on.

Also known as the "Rolling Stones effect" in academic research.

There are a few basic math prep videos here.