August 15, 2003
what's in a name
Maybe it is time to explain the title "kern f" of this blog. I found a great article yesterday describing the attitude of being "enamored with the abstract notion of math and science". I am definitely on the lightweight side of the equation.
You encounter kern f pretty early on if you read any algebra textbook. For group homomorphisms for example it's the subgroup of elements in the domain group that map to the unit element in the image group. It has all sorts of interesting properties, for one thing it is a normal subgroup. And conversely for every normal subgroup of a group there is a group homomorphism for which the subgroup is the kern of that morphism. The factor group built with kern f is isomorph to im f.
So what does this have to do with blogging ? Well, when you create a new blog in mt it asks you for a title and there's this blank textfield staring at you. It's not easy to come up with something cool. The Fishbowl blog for example has this geeky cool subtitle "tail -f /dev/mind > blog". kern f is not in that class but is something. You might be tempted to interpret some metaphor for it like this blog maps ideas to the unit element of publishing or somesuch. Ah, that's up to you. For me it was just this algebra book open on my desk (remember I'm "enamored with the abstract notion of math and science") when mt asked for a title.
Oh, the book btw is this:
"Algebra" by Serge Lang.
Posted by Uwe Hoffmann at August 15, 2003 05:22 PM