What exactly is a mathetmatical proof? From  it's clear it doesn't require any special symbols.  From      [Computer] Viruses have no “cure.” It’s been mathematically proven that it is   always possible to write a virus that any existing antivirus program   can’t stop." [0]      [0] Secrets &amp; Lies. Bruce Schneier. Page 154   In these contexts what does it even mean to be mathematically proven? Does it just mean logic was used?
I am just a high school student, and I haven't seen much in mathematics (calculus and abstract algebra).  Mathematics is a system of axioms which you choose yourself for a set of undefined entities, such that those entities satisfy certain basic rules you laid down in the first place on your own.  Now using these laid-down rules and a set of other rules for a subject called logic which was established similarly, you define certain quantities and name them using the undefined entities and then go on to prove certain statements called theorems.  Now what is a proof exactly? Suppose in an exam, I am asked to prove Pythagoras' theorem. Then I prove it using only one certain system of axioms and logic. It isn't proved in all the axiom-systems in which it could possibly hold true, and what stops me from making another set of axioms that have Pythagoras' theorem as an axiom, and then just state in my system/exam "this is an axiom, hence can't be proven".  EDIT : How is the term "wrong" defined in mathematics then ? You can say that proving fermat's last theorem using the number-theory axioms was a difficult task but then it can be taken as an axiom in another set of axioms .  Is mathematics as rigorous and as thought-through as it is believed and expected to be ? It seems to me that there many loopholes in problems as well as the subject in-itself, but there is a false backbone of rigour that seems true until you start questioning the very fundamentals .
If $\tan(\frac{\pi}{4}+\frac{y}{2})=\tan^3(\frac{\pi}{4}+\frac{x}{2})$,then prove that $\sin y=\frac{\sin x(3+\sin^2 x)}{(1+3\sin^2 x)}$ If $\tan(\frac{\pi}{4}+\frac{y}{2})=\tan^3(\frac{\pi}{4}+\frac{x}{2})$,then prove that $\sin y=\frac{\sin x(3+\sin^2 x)}{(1+3\sin^2 x)}$    $\tan(\frac{\pi}{4}+\frac{y}{2})=\tan^3(\frac{\pi}{4}+\frac{x}{2})$ $\frac{1+\tan\frac{y}{2}}{1-\tan\frac{y}{2}}=(\frac{1+\tan\frac{x}{2}}{1-\tan\frac{x}{2}})^3$ Applying componendo and dividendo rule on both sides, $\tan\frac{y}{2}=\frac{\tan\frac{x}{2}(3+\tan^2\frac{x}{2})}{(1+3\tan^2\frac{x}{2})}$ I am stuck here. Birthday Problem applied to collisions I'm trying to extend the birthday problem to detect collision probability in a hashing scheme. Here is my problem. I use the letters and numbers [A-Z][a-z][0-9] to make a set of keys by randomly choosing from that set 10 times and concatenating them all together. So A24cv30kf2 could be one key for example. This implies that the base set has $62^{10}$ possible keys. Next, I want to compute the probability that I would see a collision if I picked a key from that set and issued it to $n$ users. If $M$ represents the size of the set (= $62^{10}$) and $P(M,n)$ the probability then  $$P(M,n) = \frac{M!}{M^{n}(M-n)!}$$  This follows by replacing 365 in the well known birthday problem shown   What I want to understand is the following: I want to check and see if my choice of concatenating 10 is right, when I know that my $n$ is of the order of a few millions and my $1 - P(M,n)$ needs to be less than 0.0001 or some small number. The large values of M &amp; n make the above intractable to compute. Is there an easier way to compute this? Right-hand sidebar covers the footer on the "ask question" page and markdown help page I have noticed that while asking questions and scrolling to the bottom of the page, the right sidebar containing recent questions covers the footer partially. Also, a part of it goes beyond the browser's boundary. It may not be a big problem but it still doesn't look good.    This also happens on the  page How does ServerName and ServerAlias work? I'm working through Rotman (1994). It's the 2nd chapter where my curiosity lead me to a question that is not from the book. Here's the problem that inspired the question:      2.8. Imbed $S_n$ as a subgroup of $A_{n+2}$, but show, for $n\ge2$, that $S_n$ cannot be imbedded in $A_{n+1}.$    Since the alternate subgroup has the property of even parity, I thought that a little investigation of parity for the second and third symmetric groups was in order. So I constructed a table for each of them, grouped by even and odd number of disjoint products.   I'll forego writing the actual table and simply provide the answers. In symmetric groups with an even idegree, two even permutations come together under composition to produce an even permutation. Two odds also make an even. Two different parities produce odd elements.   When the symmetric group has an odd degree, e.g. $S_3$, two odds make an odd, two evens make an odd, and two different parities make an even element. Exactly the opposite results from the symmetric groups with even index.   Two questions: is this enough to prove the $A_{n+1}$ case? And can this be generalized modulo 2 e.g. $A_{2n+1}$? Get file size before uploading MySQL shutting down without warning, out of memory? Why not use tables for layout in HTML? It seems to be the  that tables should not be used for layout in HTML.   Why?  I have never (or rarely to be honest) seen good arguments for this. The usual answers are:   It's good to But this is a fallacious argument; . I guess it's true that using the table element for layout has little to do with tabular data. So what? Does my boss care? Do my users care?Perhaps me or my fellow developers who have to maintain a web page care... Is a table less maintainable? I think using a table is  than using divs and CSS.By the way... why is using a div or a span good separation of content from layout and a table not? Getting a good layout with only divs often requires a lot of nested divs. Readability of the codeI think it's the other way around. Most people understand HTML, few understand CSS. It's better for SEO not to use tablesWhy? Can anybody show some evidence that it is? Or a statement from Google that tables are discouraged from an SEO perspective? Tables are slower.An extra tbody element has to be inserted. This is peanuts for modern web browsers. Show me some benchmarks where the use of a table significantly slows down a page. A layout overhaul is easier without tables, see .Most web sites that need an upgrade need new content (HTML) as well. Scenarios where a new version of a web site only needs a new CSS file are not very likely. Zen Garden is a nice web site, but a bit theoretical. Not to mention its  of CSS.   I am really interested in good arguments to use divs + CSS instead of tables. How do you express that your understanding of something is completely changed? When something blows your mind and changes your understanding of something that you've believed in for years, how do you express it (formally or informally)? Calendar link to different page views Indian passport holder. Do I need transit visa in Sydney? When is "Y" a vowel? In school we are taught the vowels: A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.    got me thinking about when the letter Y is considered to be a vowel.  I understand (perhaps incorrectly) that in words like bicycle and why it is a vowel. What about the word voyeur (as mentioned in the XKCD alt-text)?   If I've got this backwards, and Y is almost always a vowel, how can I tell when it is a consonant? Thinking back, I don't think my education ever covered the difference between them, we just memorized which letters were which. Unable to get Excel to recognise date in column I constantly have problems working with dates in Excel, I must be doing something wrong but I don't understand what.  I have a spreadsheet, exported from our exchange server, that contains a column with dates on. They have come out in US format even though I'm in the UK.   The column in question looks like this  04/08/2012 04/09/2009 04/01/2010 04/21/2011 04/05/2012 08/30/2009 08/29/2010 08/28/2011   In Excel, I have highlighted the column and selected Format Cells.... In this dialog box, I have selected the Date, selected English (United States) as the locale and chosen the matching date format from the list. I hit OK and try to sort the data by this column.   In the sort dialogue I choose this column, select sort on Values but the order only gives me options for A to Z, not oldest to newest as I would expect.  This in turn sorts the date data by the first two digits.  I am aware I could re-format this data to ISO and then the A to Z sort would work but I shouldn't have too, I'm obviously missing something. What is it?  EDIT: I messed up the bounty but this should have gone to @r0berts answer, his first suggestion of Text to Columns with no delimiter and choosing 'MDY' as the type of data works. Additionally, if you have a time (i.e. 04/21/2015 18:34:22), you need to first get rid of the time data. However after that the method suggested by @r0berts works fine. Number of non-decreasing functions? Let $A = \{1,2,3,\dots,10\}$ and $B = \{1,2,3,\dots,20\}$. Find the number of non-decreasing functions from $A$ to $B$.  What  I tried: Number of non-decreasing functions = (Total functions) - (Number of decreasing functions) Total functions are $20^{10}$. And I think there are ${20 \choose 10}$ decreasing functions. Since you choose any $10$ codomain numbers and there's just one way for them to be arranged so that the resultant is a decreasing function. However my answer doesn't match. Where am I going wrong? How can I directly compute the non-decreasing functions like without subtracting from total? Mean Squared Error (MSE) of parameter $p$ in binomial distribution: intuition How to call drupal_bootstrap from custom file in subfolder? I'm trying to call drupal_bootstrap from 'temp.php' in a subfolder called 'custom' my code as follow:  chdir('../'); define('DRUPAL_ROOT', getcwd()); require_once DRUPAL_ROOT . '/includes/bootstrap.inc'; drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);   Once I call the temp.php I get Drupal homepage.   I also tried an explicit physical path but with no use, code as follow:  define('DRUPAL_ROOT', '/var/htdocs/drupal7'); require_once '../includes/bootstrap.inc'; drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);   temp.php located under the following folder structure:  - var -- htdocs --- drupal7 ---- custom  ----- temp.php StringTokenizer? Convert the String to a char[] and iterate over that? Something else? Spacelike interval and length contraction I am having a serious trouble finding an agreement between the two facts in Special Relativity:  (1) given two events $A$ and $B$ in spacetime separeted by a spacelike interval $s$, the distance in space between the two events will be the shortest in the reference frame which the two events occur simultaneously:   The invariance of the interval says $s^2=(\Delta x)^2-(c\Delta t)^2$ and $\Delta x$ is minimum when $\Delta t=0$  (2) the length contraction says $L=\dfrac{L_0}{\gamma}$ where $\gamma=(1-(v/c)^2)^{-1/2}$ , $L_0$ is the proper length of an object in a reference frame which the object is at rest and $L$ is the length of the object in a reference frame which the object moves with speed $v$ in the $x$ direction.  This says that the lenght of the object in the $x$ direction is the largest in the comoving reference frame of this object.  The question is: According to (1), the reference frame in which two events $A$ and $B$ occur simultaneously is the reference frame that gives the shortest distance in space between the two events. Let $A$ and $B$ be the two end points of a meter stick in a reference frame in which the stick is at rest and at time $t=0$. This two events occur simultaneously, so the distance in space between the two is the shortest acording to (1). But according to (2) shouldn't this distance be the largest?  What is wrong? Fig.1: A typical prompt, asking user for feedback/rating in iOS Background Any serious smartphone users must have seen a message similar to Fig.1 above at least once. Variations of such prompt include: &quot;Please give us 5 star ratings if you love this app!&quot;, &quot;Rate us :)&quot;, &quot;Your rating helps improve this app!&quot;, etc. Basically, Fig.1 asks user to leave a (nice) feedback/rating for the app on its AppStore(or equivalents).  The Shorter Question  When and how often should a mobile app user be asked to leave a feedback/ratings?   The Longer Question #1. Which User-statistics? What are the significant user's behavioral statistics that should be based on to generate Fig.1? For example:  Number of runs since install/reinstall of the application Time elapsed since current application run Time elapsed since first application run Time elapsed since first application install Certain events (e.g. after certain number of stages are cleared for a game app)  #2. When to Ask? If multiple user-statistics are chosen to be calculated to generate Fig.1, specifically how should the user-statistics satisfy the condition of the event? For example:  Form a unified equation (e.g. X^2+Y^2=Z^2) with all significant user-statistics partaken fairly to trigger the event. Create (multiple of) &quot;absolute&quot; event triggers (e.g. every 10th app run; elapsing 2 hours since current application run). Both of the two. Generate Fig.1 whichever comes true first. Neither of the two. &quot;There's a better way!&quot;  #3. How often? What would be the optimal min/max frequency of Fig.1 generation? By optimal, I mean users are not to be bothered too much, yet developers gain maximum output of great feedbacks from users? #4. &quot;Don't bother me again :(&quot; Should users have an option to opt-out from receiving Fig.1 at all? #5. Universal User-statistics for All Mobile Apps? Should apps under different categories be based on different user-statistics? There are significant differences in size and type of user-statistics in apps under different categories. For example, a &quot;Flashlight&quot; app is not typically run for one hour straight, while a music/movie streaming app may be run for over one hour. #6. &quot;This app does not need more feedback.&quot; Should every app of all kinds of user base ask this message? If any, should any mobile app stop generating Fig.1 when target conditions are met (e.g. downloads count, active user count, feedback count)? #7. Feedback/Rating Before Deletion Should users be asked to leave a feedback before deleting as seen in Fig.2 below? Users are more likely to leave very critical review on app deletion, but this kind of feedback will be very helpful for the developers to strengthen their app's weakness for next version release.                                                                                                 Fig.2: Asking user for rating before app deletion How to determine which window manager is running Is there any way (such as a command or environmental variable) to determine what window manager is the one actively running in the current session?