Like so many things I both know and don't know

Things we know we know.

What is the point of university? In the modern state, we are faced with a plethora of competing and sometimes contradictory answers to this question. To some extent, the answer depends on who is paying, which differs considerably between countries. At one extreme, the Nordic countries continue to fund higher education almost entirely from general taxation. At the other, private institutions in ...

I Know What I Know

How important is software construction? Software construction has been the awkward stepchild of software engineering for decades. This puzzles me because software construction is the only activity that’s guaranteed to be done on every project. Code is the center of the software universe. Process advocates tend to downplay coding, focusing more on the documentation that occurs before and after c...

A Professional and a Gentleman: the Enrico Drioli I know

Simple Things We Don’t Know

This is a quite faithful rendering of a Colloquio De Giorgi I had the honor to give at Scuola Normale Superiore on March 21, 2012. The idea was to explain some open problems in arithmetic algebraic geometry which are simple to state but which remain shrouded in mystery. 1. An interactive game: dimension zero Suppose I give you an integer N ≥ 2, and tell you that I am thinking of a monic integer...

23 things I know about modules for Scheme

The benefits of modularization are well known. However, modules are not standard in Scheme. This paper accompanies an invited talk at the Scheme Workshop 2002 on the current state of modules for Scheme. Implementation is not addressed, only linguistic features are covered. Cave lector, this paper only reflects my own and instantaneous biases!