User talk:Sam Staton

/Archive 1

Substitution in Lambda Calculus

Yeah, I screwed up. I thought I could define the concept of substitution and then express both the alpha and beta reduction rules using this concept, but I see now that this is not the right approach. This is all more subtle and complex than I had originally thought. I'm back to real work tomorrow, but I should have something more sensible next weekend. Thanks for the correction. A B Carter (talk) 23:49, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Quaternion

Many non-mathematicians need to find the definition of a quaternion as a rotation. For them Rotation operator (vector space) is the right reference. Only some mathematicians are interested in the "division algebra"

Stamcose (talk) 21:30, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Meetup

FYI, the fourth Cambridge meetup will occur on the afternoon of Saturday 1 August. Charles Matthews (talk) 19:07, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

WP:WPCS

Since you edit here often enough Computer Science articles, perhaps you could add that wikiproject to your watch list. More informed participants in the discussions that sometimes take place there couldn't hurt. It also serves as notice board for some events related to CS articles. Thanks, Pcap ping 23:38, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Denotational semantics

You should probably be aware of this unfortunate part of Wikipedia's history, and its unfortunate, but inevitable outcome. Someone knowledgeable in that area (like you) could certainly improve the article a fair bit. Pcap ping 00:26, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

You should also be aware that some of the IPs on the the talk page of that article probably still are Carl Hewit, e.g. Special:Contributions/70.231.253.115. Pcap ping 00:49, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Pcap. I do find this quite challenging. I did quite a bit of work on Denotational semantics in 2007, and I had extensive discussions with Carl (aka IP) via the talk page then. I hadn't seen the post-case clarification, it seems quite severe, but thanks. Sam (talk) 05:24, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

My intention was certainly not to spook you from working on the article. For all practical purposes, unless someone reports Carl's IPs, they are not going to get blocked. I don't see a real need to do that unless edit wars occur or reasonable discussion on the talk page breaks down. Some IPs, which probably aren't Carl, recently added rather dubious statements like "However, it turned out that general computation could not be implemented in the lambda calculus (see Indeterminacy in concurrent computation)". [1]. This seems patently false to me. Pcap ping 17:23, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Hi, you didn't spook me! This was indeed a comment of Carl's that was reinstated. It is fair to say that a very basic simply-typed lambda calculus does not allow a very nice description of various phenomena, including concurrency, and that traditional domain theory also has drawbacks in this regard. However, I disagree with the statement because it seems reasonable to expect that any category of "domains" that does respect these phenomena would have some kind of cartesian/monoidal closed structure. Sam (talk) 08:22, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, it certainly wasn't obvious to me that "lambda calculus" was simply typed in that context as opposed to untyped. Anyway, it's better that that long section is gone now. Pcap ping 08:54, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

It seems i'm a bit late to this most recent Carl Hewitt spate, but seeing Sam's ongoing discussion at Talk:Denotational semantics i thought i'd note my filing of Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/CarlHewitt for these and other suspected IP addresses. —Piet Delport (talk) 2009-10-21 02:12

Cambridge meetup 14 November

Another Cambridge meetup is set for the afternoon of Saturday 14 November. Please contribute to the page and come along if you can. Charles Matthews (talk) 20:23, 11 November 2009 (UTC)