Thursday, July 24, 2014

Achievement Unlocked: Construct Infinite Loop in \Latex

Until just now, I never realized that it was possible to construct an infinite loop in \Latex. But it is, and an infinite loop is indeed an understandable outcome of the following text: \newcommand{\lcm}{\mbox{\lcm}}", which I of course obtained via the magic of 'replace all'. It turns out that my \Latex compiler (TeXShop) apparently has an automatic abort for such situations.

2 comments:

j2kun said...

You may also be interested to know that the TeX macro language is Turing-complete. So you could potentially write a paper that disproves the Goldbach conjecture, should it ever compile.

Mason said...

Nice. :)

My PhD supervisor was obsessed with the Goldbach conjecture (in a 'please stay close to your expertise in quantum physics' kind of way).