by I’ve been reading the long thread kicked off by Luke Kanies’s email about the state of system administration as illustrated by the current tools. A minor subthread touched on why there aren’t more books about system administration theory, what that theory is, and so forth. A couple of mathematical topics were briefly mentioned, and it kicked off some associations for me, so I started a list of mathematical or theoretical things I’ve found more or less relevant or helpful or just interesting, in no particular order:
- Nyquist sampling theorem
- Queueing theory
- Human-computer interfaces
- Computer architecture (in the Hennessy & Patterson sense, not the “administrator” vs “architect” sense)
- Channel codes, ECC, turbo codes
- Weibull equation/distribution
- Protocol design — I don’t honestly know much about the theory, but I know there is a fair amount of it
- Cryptography, of course, and security in the broader sense
Of course none of these would be described as “system administration theory” by its specialists.