Introductionary questions

Please, send me an email (to iposov+mp@gmail.com) with answers to the following questions. Mandatory questions are in bold, you may skip any other questions, if you don’t feel like answering them.

1. What is your name, your country, your city? What languages do you speak?
2. Did you program previously? What programming languages do you know and to what level? (Java, C/C++, Pascal, Basic, Python, etc.)
3. Have you used any mathematical software? Matlab/Octave, Mathematica, Maple, Magma, SageMath, etc. May be you have used Python for some scientific computations?
4. Do you have a laptop, that you might had easily taken to our classes, if we had classes offline?
5. Please, install GNU Octave. Here is the link https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/#install Did you have any issues installing it?
6. One programming question. Given an array, find its minimal element. You may use any programming language, or even you may write a pseudo-code. Don’t write any code to read or output any data, I want to see only the main idea of how would you find the minimal element.
7. 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.
8. 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.