Nick Higham's Numerical Linear Algebra group at the University of Manchester is hosting a conference celebrating Jack Dongarra's 70th birthday July 7 and 8. I am giving a talk, virtually, on July 7. I plan to reminisce about how I did computing in the days before everybody had their own computer in their lap. Here are the slides for the talk, some notes, and some links to this blog for more details.... read more >>

A recent episode of the popular YouTube channel "blackpenredpen" is about solutions to the famous equation... read more >>

My friend Paul Saylor passed away on November 7th.... read more >>

My post a few days ago, Gil Strang and the CR Matrix Factorization, generated a lot of email. Here is the resulting follow-up to that post.... read more >>

My friend Gil Strang is known for his lectures from MIT course 18.06, Linear Algebra, which are available on MIT OpenCourseWare. He is now describing a new approach to the subject with a series of videos, A 2020 Vision of Linear Algebra. This vision is featured in a new book, Linear Algebra for Everyone.... read more >>

Many observers have noted that the United States Senate has become increasingly partisan in recent years. Votes are being made more frequently along strict political party lines. The singular value decomposition, the SVD, of matrices derived from records of roll call votes in the senate can measure this partisanship.... read more >>

I've blogged about this gem from Lothar Collatz (1910-1990) before, but it deserves to be repeated. Especially since it now provides an elegant example of singleton expansion.... read more >>

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 >>

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 >>