## Tuesday, November 08, 2011

### a little too easy (updated)

[from evening of 6 Nov 2011]

i'm getting suspicious.
last week i came up with a proof to a particular case of a conjecture,
but it was shorter than i expected it to be.

over the weekend, i thought i spotted an error,
but yesterday i checked it again, and was easily fixed.
i'm still suspicious.

if it were this easy,
then someone would have written it up by now ..

.. so it's time to take a long, hard look at it,
see where the error really is.

[updated: morning of 7 Nov 2011]

i'm LaTeXing the argument, as we speak.  there are subtleties to handle, but no big problems yet.

in fact, the biggest problem is handling my keyboard:
in regards to LaTeX, the annoying thing about european keyboard layouts is that the dollar sign ${\$}$isn't as accessible as in a US keyboard layout (for obvious reasons). in particular, to type a "${\$}$" the command is assymmetric:

it's [Alt Gr] + [4] on a finnish keyboard, as opposed to [Shift] + [4] in the US, so i have to consciously type the command with my right hand.

this wouldn't be a big deal with anything else, but i use dollar signs all the time, in order to pass to math mode.
so i've switched to the US keyboard layout .. with the problem that the labels on the keys are still in the Finnish layout.

luckily, i've been typing for enough years that i don't consciously think about the keys .. but every so often, i forget:

where's the asterisk key again?  is it [Shift] + [8] ..?

Dollar signs are so 1990s. All the cool kids use  for inline formulas (and of course,  for displays).
For one thing, Perl uses $x,$y, etc for scalar variables, which conflicts with TeX whenever the two are used simultaneously. Namely, within the WebWork system.
it takes two keystrokes for $as opposed to one keystroke for a dollar sign. cool or not, that still sounds more efficient to me. (-: Leonid said... Or one key combination to enter \($ and then move the cursor two positions back... most editors can do that.