Leonhard Euler was an influential Swiss mathematician who made significant contributions to various fields. For polynomials, Euler developed methods for solving infinite polynomials, expressed functions as power series, and introduced Eulerian polynomials.
Using a Test Driven Development (TDD) approach, I wrote a Java 23 program called BoundingBox that reads
a 2D ASCII grid from standard input and detects the largest or all non-overlapping bounding boxes enclosing
contiguous regions of asterisks (*). It is designed to handle large inputs efficiently and uses the
Disjoint Set Union-Find (DSU) data structure algorithm to identify
connected components. Each bounding box is defined by the minimum and maximum x and y coordinates
(with 1-based indexing) that surround a connected group of * characters.
Scala is a general purpose statically typed language that seamlessly blends object-oriented and functional programming. Its expressive syntax and functional features, along with its JVM compatibility, makes it an attractive choice for developers. Although it has a steep learning curve, mastering Scala can lead to highly performant and stable software, especially in concurrent environments. All of this is what caught my eye many years ago when I first came across Scala.