what’s an application anyway

Stephen Boyd quips about a power allocation algorithm:

Oh by the way, this is used now, for example, in DSL and it’s used actually everywhere. Okay, and I’m not talking about used by …professors… I’m talking about, it’s used when you use DSL.

Sometimes engineers forget that to a mathematician, an “application” is another theoretical problem … only maybe in physics.

Comments

  1. March 22nd, 2011 | 8:59

    Sorry, i do not understand what you mean with this post. Which algorithm do you mean?

  2. me
    March 23rd, 2011 | 13:54

    Stephen Boyd was referring generally to practical algorithms (using optimization) for allocating a fixed amount of power among channels of differing SNRs. He was contrasting this to theoretical water-filling results on which these algorithms are based.

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