SageMath

Trained as an electrical engineer, I am most comfortable with Matlab in terms of serving my math need. However, for symbolic math problems, Matlab is not as intuitive as Mathematica (of course, we can still do it though. Check out “syms”). But I never get used to the syntax of Mathematica. And I found the…

Minimum requirements of a good engineering employee

As title, just some random thought… Able to get things done independently (should be something reasonably complex and takes days or weeks to finish) Care what he is doing and be responsible to his products Good understanding of the current progress of the project and able to communicate this with the team Just to be…

Xournal for presentation

I am using more and more beamer this year. Since I used linux, I used to use evince to display my slides. But in my last class, I would like to write something on the slides and I was not prepared for that. My laptop is a nice good old X230t with a stylus on it….

Why I use Linux

This is a re-post of a blog post I wrote for my department blog couple years ago. I just read it again and I found it still relevant. For those of you who have been to my office or have taken my classes will know that I am a big Linux fan. I started to…

Data Processing Inequality

A very intuitive yet powerful inequality in information theory is the data processing inequality. Lemma: If random variable $latex X$, $latex Y$ and $latex Z$ form a Markov chain $latex X \rightarrow Y \rightarrow Z$, then $latex I(X;Y) \ge I(X;Z)$. The great thing about the inequality is that unlike some results in information theory, it…