CONTENTS
But don’t stop there! At this point you’ll be one of very few people in the world who
have ever understood your problem area so well. It will therefore be your responsibility to
discover what else is true, in the neighborhood of that problem, using the same or similar
methods to what your brain can now envision. Take your results to their “natural boundary”
(inasenseanalogoustothenaturalboundarywhereafunctionofacomplexvariableceases
to be analytic).
My little book Surreal Numbers provides an authentic example of research as it is hap-
pening. The characters in that story make false starts and useful discoveries in exactly the
same order as I myself made those false starts and useful discoveries, when I first studied
John Conway’s fascinating axioms about number systems — his amazingly simple axioms
that go significantly beyond real-valued numbers.
(One of the characters in that book tends to succeed or fail by brute force and patience;
the other is more introspective, and able to see a bigger picture. Both of them represent
aspects of my own activities while doing research. With that book I hoped to teach research
skills “by osmosis”, as readers observe a detailed case study.)
SurrealNumbersdealswithapurelymathematicaltopic,notespeciallyclosetocomputer
science; it features algebra and logic, not algorithms. When algorithms become part of the
research, a beautiful new dimension also comes into play: Algorithms can be implemented
on computers!
I strongly recommend that you look for every opportunity to write programs that carry
out all or a part of whatever algorithms relate to your research. In my experience the very
act of writing such a program never fails to deepen my understanding of the problem area.( Donald E. Knuth –https://theorydish.blog/2018/02/01/donald-knuth-on-doing-research/)
Good luck!
About the Korean translation
In January 2015, the Acorn publishing company (www.acornpub.co.kr) in South Korea did a huge amount
of work in translating and publishing this book (as it was in August 2014) into Korean.
It’s available now attheir website.
The translator is Byungho Min (twitter/tais9). The cover art was done by the artistic Andy Nechaevsky, a
friend of the author:facebook/andydinka. Acorn also holds the copyright to the Korean translation.
So, ifyouwanttohavearealbookonyourshelfinKoreanandwanttosupportthiswork, itisnowavailable
for purchase.
About the Persian/Farsi translation
In 2016 the book was translated by Mohsen Mostafa Jokar (who is also known to Iranian community for
his translation of Radare manual^34 ). It is available on the publisher’s website^35 (Pendare Pars).
Here is a link to a 40-page excerpt:https://beginners.re/farsi.pdf.
NationalLibraryofIranregistrationinformation:http://opac.nlai.ir/opac-prod/bibliographic/4473995.
About the Chinese translation
In April 2017, translation to Chinese was completed by Chinese PTPress. They are also the Chinese trans-
lation copyright holders.
The Chinese version is available for order here:http://www.epubit.com.cn/book/details/4174. A par-
tial review and history behind the translation can be found here:http://www.cptoday.cn/news/detail/
3155.
The principal translator is Archer, to whom the author owes very much. He was extremely meticulous (in
a good sense) and reported most of the known mistakes and bugs, which is very important in literature
such as this book. The author would recommend his services to any other author!
(^34) http://rada.re/get/radare2book-persian.pdf
(^35) http://goo.gl/2Tzx0H
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