Showing posts with label thesis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thesis. Show all posts

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Back.

No, I haven't given up on this blog. Writing my thesis and the numerous reading-correction-rewriting cycles became strenuous and obsessive. The only way not to completely loose my mind - and my friends - was to have a life as normal as possible during the rare moments of rest. This required not to blog on anything about my thesis. Or on anything closely - or loosely - related to science, technology, computers, libraries, books, paper, pens, etc. And during that period, I had absolutely no desire to read anything scientific.

So, here I am after a couple of months. I'm most likely talking in the big internet emptiness, as my rare posts haven't opened the doors of google for me - yet. But I do want to keep writing, even though this may be too time consuming to be done regularly right now.

I submitted my dissertation about a month ago, which means that I'm only a few days away from having to defend my work. My presentation's ready, my slides are pretty. My feelings about the present situation are mixed. I do know the people in my jury - at different degrees - and they have already submitted their report. Which means that the outcome is more or less already defined. Moreover, a thesis director who does their job doesn't let their student submit a work, whose quality is not sufficient. But still, here I am.  Nervous and full of questions. Nothing's never sure, even though the most likely question is how much correction I'll have to bring to the final version of my dissertation.

And once this is behind me, so many questions will arise: where do I want my career to go? Will I  go through unemployment? Will I find a job in Switzerland or will I have to move abroad? Do I want to move abroad? I'm trying not to think too much about this. Yet.

A few more days.


Monday, July 27, 2009

In case you're not writing your thesis right now....

... why not read this instead?

It's only post No. 4 and I'm already not fully translating my notes... My excuse is that it's a very practical post, so I'll skip the introduction on what is LaTeX and my attempts at humorous comments to focus on what you're looking for if you ended up here...

In this forum I found the best way to define the functions argmin and argmax in LaTex. I slightly modified it to add a small space \: or even smaller space \, between arg and max and here is it.

\newcommand{\argmin}[2]{%
\smash{\mathop{{\rm arg \: min}}\limits_{#1}}\, #2}

in the preamble - i.e. before \begin{document} - and then simply call the function with

\argmin{x}{f(x)}

and tada!



Beautiful.