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 >>

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

I have always been fascinated by the names that are used to describe colors. There are dozens of web sites with lists of color names. I was surprised to discover that the shade of blue we use in MathWorks logo is almost the same as the one used by the United States Air Force Academy.... 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 >>