Where to start?

To reiterate from my last post, my goal for this blog is to use it as a sounding board for my studies in the theory of computation. I plan to regurgitate whatever I've been reading, in the hopes that by summarizing and explaining it here, my own understanding will be enhanced. If I do a good enough job at explaining things, perhaps it will be useful to some of you who are reading this. Please feel encouraged to leave comments. I've found in the past that much of my learning occured while attempting to respond to questions from others.

Before I can start on this endeavor, there are a couple of issues I need to deal with. The first is where to start. I sometimes feel that I ought to go back to the very beginning, and start with calculus and linear algebra and related math stuff. I haven't used any of that since leaving college and I've forgotten most of it. As a practical matter, though, I don't want to spend the time it would take to work through all of that. Any bits and pieces that I find that I need, I can relearn as I go along. More specialized areas of math such as logic or graph theory, that appear heavily in certain areas of theoretical computer science, might be worth studying in depth. But I'll wait until I need these before undertaking this. For now, I think I'll begin with an introductory text in the theory of computation. There seem to be literally hundreds of these to choose from, and I'll spend some time looking at the choices in future posts. For now, let me just say that I have a copy of the new edition of Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation, and that will be one of my main resources.

There is another, more basic issue I have to address, and that is how to deal with the technical details of how to communicate with you. Using Blogger should be easy enough, but since I haven't done this before I will need to spend a certain amount of time learning the Blogger interface and refreshing my memory of HTML. Then there is the question of how to handle mathematical notation. For simple equations, I could make do with features of vanilla HTML, like writing &sub for the subset sign ⊂. Clearly this won't work well for more detailed expositions. MathML was designed to handle this sort of situation, and I'll probably spend some time playing with that. My inclination, though, is to use LaTex and save the output as a PDF file which I can post. Since I haven't used LaTex before, this will give me a whole new subject to write about on this blog.