Alexa tells me that the definition of serendipity is "the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way."... read more >>

"A History of MATLAB", a 67-page paper that Jack Little and I have written, has been published by the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, in the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, volume 4, June 2020.... read more >>

It has been a while since I made a blog post. It is because I am preparing to give a talk next week on"The Evolution of the Evolution of MATLAB"on E-NLA, the Online seminar series on Numerical... read more >>

John Horton ConwayFrom the New York Times, April 15, 2020John Horton Conway, a ‘Magical Genius’ in Math, Dies at... read more >>

I have completely rewritten the COVID-19 simulator that I described in last week's blog post and I now have a second version.... read more >>

ContentsSimulatorAnimationFirst frameFinal frameFull barrierNo barrierLarger populationSmaller populationSoftwareSimulator help covid19 Epidemic simulation. Inspired by Washington Post... read more >>

Today is Friday, March 13, 2020. In many parts of the world, Friday the 13th is considered unlucky. I've written blog posts about Friday the 13th before, 2012, 2018, but I will have something new to say today.... read more >>

Tomorrow, February 29, 2020 would be Gene Golub's 22nd birthday.... read more >>

I have learned a lot more about Kuramoto oscillators since I wrote my blog post three weeks ago. I am working with Indika Rajapakse at the University of Michigan and Stephen Smale at the University of California, Berkeley. They are interested in the Kuramoto model because they are studying the beating of human heart cells. At this point we have some interesting results and some unanswered questions.... read more >>

Fireflies on a summer evening, pacemaker cells, neurons in the brain, a flock of starlings in flight, pendulum clocks mounted on a common wall, bizarre chemical reactions, alternating currents in a power grid, oscillations in SQUIDs (superconducting quantum interference devices). These are all examples of synchronized oscillators.... read more >>