Ch. 1, Problems 1, 2, and 3 - Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences by Philip Bevington:

1. How many significant figures are there in the following numbers?
   1. 976.45
   2. 84,000
   3. 0.0094
   4. 301.07
   5. 4.000
   6. 10
   7. 5280
   8. 400
2. What is the most significant figure in each of the numbers? What is the least significant?
3. Rround off each of the numbers above to two significant digits.

I've been reading 21st Century C and I think the author has provided a lot of good insight on how to deal with strings in a modern way. To this end I'm posting my notes as code here with a couple links to stuff on stackexchange which I found helpful while trying to understand asprintf:

First to understand what asprintf is all about I found this discussion helpful. I've reproduced it here for myself to get everything in one place:

Exercise 2, Ch. 1, Sec. 3 - Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces (Manfredo do Carmo): A circular disk of radius 1 in the plane \(xy\) rolls without slipping along the \(x\) axis. The figure described by a point of the circumference of the disk is called a cycloid. a) Obtain a parametrized curve \(\alpha: \mathbb{R}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{2} \) the trace of which is the cycloid and determine its singular points.

Seems like every six months or so I get on a C coding kick and start poking around with it again. When I do it's always the same thing. I start going through the OS code, bust out something like Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment or K&R to look something up then it happens... I remember how frustrated I am with coding in C and how all the textbooks seem so archaic. It's maddening for me really. My go to language is Python and I just don't get why people aren't coding in C more like we do with Python.

Most people who can code in one scripting language find themselves scripting with others (e.g. Perl, PHP, and Ruby) on a pretty regular basis. I know I do and it happens to all scripting guys whether you're doing windows scripting, agile web development, or you're just working on a little command line utility for *nix. Well let me introduce you to hyperployglot!