Introductionary questions

Please, send me an email (to iposov@gmail.com) with answers to the following questions. You may skip any question, if you don’t feel like answering it.

  1. What is your name, your country, your city? What languages do you speak?
  2. What did you study previously? What was your bachelor thesis about, if you had one?
  3. Did you program prevously? What programming languages do you know and to what level? (Java, C/C++, Pascal, Basic, Python, etc.)
  4. Have you used any mathematical software? Matlab/Octave, Mathematica, Maple, Magma, SageMath, etc. May be you have used Python for some scientific computations?
  5. Do you have a computer at home, that you may use to do your assignments?
  6. Do you have a laptop, that you may easily take to our classes?
  7. Please, install GNU Octave. Here is the link https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/#install Did you have any issues installing it?
  8. Please, register at http://cocalc.com and This is the site where you will upload your completed assignments. What email did you use to register? I will add you to our course.
  9. One programming question. Given an array, find its minimal element. You may use any programming language, or even you may write a pseudo-code.
  10. Another programming question. Given an array, find its two minimal elements. Can you avoid using two loops, that is can you use only one loop or no loops at all? You may use any programming language, or even you may write a pseudo-code.
  11. And finally, some fun with mathematics. You have a board with numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You may perform the following operation: erease any two numbers and write their difference on the board. For example, after the first operation it is possible to obtain a board with numbers 1, 2, -1, 5 where -1 is 3-4. Or it is possible to obtain 1, 2, 1, 5, where the last 1 is 4-3. The question is, what is the maximal number that can be written on the board after four operations? Explain your answer.