One of my favorite math/programming mashups is that you can take an algebraic data type (like in OCaml, Haskell, F# etc) and convert it into a function, and the series expansion of the function counts the number of instantiations of the data type.
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The mind-blowingly cool thing is that you can differentiate the generating function to get a new function, and if you turn that back into an ADT, it is the zipper type associated with the original ADT (that is, the full data structure plus a 'focus' that you can move around)
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I first saw this in a Conor McBride paper from about 2000 but I'm not sure if that's the first time it was noticed, as once you have the ADT <--> generating function correspondence, differentiating it seems like quite a natural thing to do
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.176.2720&rep=rep1&type=pdf …Show this thread -
Anyway I will probably go back to regularly scheduled finance content after this, feel free to ignore and pretend nothing weird has happened if you like.
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