
Learn Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science via Primary Historical Sources - mapleoin
http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/historical-projects/
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antiform
This is certainly an interesting approach, but does anybody have any firsthand
experience with learning a technical discipline from primary historical
sources? While I do enjoy reading the original papers for many mathematical
ideas, it seems like if it were done in a course, it would be very slow-going
and leave much of the material—especially in a huge subject like Discrete
Math—uncovered.

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magv
I have. All of my knowledge of theoretic CS comes from research papers.

There's pretty much no such thing as computer science education in my region
(Ukraine) -- no theory is covered whatsoever. Long story short, I'm studying
physics instead.

Anyway, my interest in programming eventually lead me to interest in Scheme
and specifically, compiler construction. And the only source of information on
this subject are research papers published online.

So for the last five years I've read half of readscheme.org, and some papers
from the home pages of various researchers. Topics include algorithms and data
structures, various programming techniques, garbage collection, control flow
analysis, and so on.

I can attest that productivity of this method is low. It's hard to read about
relations between CPS and Monadic style, while you don't know the definition
of either. But eventually it comes to you; after a number of papers with
lambda-calculus inside you can pretty much infer the notation.

Another issue is that some large chunks of knowledge are missing; some topics
are out of scope of these papers, some are considered to be common knowledge.
And you often just don't know what have you missed; needless to say such
education is fragmentary.

On the other hand, over the years I've mostly lost interest in physics, but
interest for CS is higher then ever; and I believe it's no coincidence.

So there. While this is not the fastest way of learning, it certainly has
advantages.

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sachmanb
this is great - especially the history of truth PDF which is linked to within
the article. thanks a lot.

