## Monday, September 20, 2010

### $\LaTeX$ on Blogger? Yes!

$\LaTeX$ is a powerful tool to properly express our ideas and thoughts that every wannabe researcher should know. A question I had, sometime ago, were if $\LaTeX$ worked in Blogger. Today I have found the answer: yes, we can use $\LaTeX$ here:

$y_{k} = \sum_{i}^{l} \alpha_{i} + 1$

The two things you have to do are:
(1) create a new HTML/Javascript third-party application, and
(2) enter the code found
here.

The script replaces the $\LaTeX$ code for images,
easy and fast :-)

## Thursday, September 9, 2010

### Creativity and Everything Else

Today I want to share some thoughts on creativity and research. As a wannabe researcher, sometimes I get completely obscured by apparently impossible problems. How in the world this problem or that other one are solved? Why this solution/formula/algorithm worked and how? Sometimes straight, good-old logical thinking is not enough to confront problems and the only true way is to take the problem from another point of view, introducing fresh, radical and creative ideas.

I want to share two wonderful videos that talk about creativity. The first one is take the world from another point of view, an interview to the great Richard Feynman and the second is a talk performed by Murray Gell-mann.

Professor Feynman, Novel Price awarded in 1965, famous for his Feynman Diagrams among many other things is interviewed and talks about how to confront complex problems in the research world. Its a worth seeing video that no researcher has to miss.

Professor Gell-mann, Novel Price awarded in 1969, famous for suggesting quarks as the most fundamental particles inside atom nucleus, among many other things, does a talk about getting creative ideas, not only in science but in any human endeavour. Similarly to Feynman's interview on take the world from another point of view, professor Gell-mann suggests that, to solve complex problems we have to avoid local minima at all cost by randomly choosing any possible stuff to solve these problems (oh, wait, that's evolutive computation for you). Although the entire video longs more than an hour, the talk only lasts half an hour. A must see for any entrepreneurial researcher.

I hope you enjoy these videos as I did.