My recent obsession with cubes in this blog has led me back to Rubik's cube, perhaps the greatest mathematical puzzle of all time.... read more >>

On a recent visit to Ann Arbor, I met ten-year old Eden Rajapakse. Here is her sketch of the L-shaped membrane. Download Live... read more >>

The Menger sponge is a popular fractal that generalizes Cantor sets and Sierpinski triangles. Its fractal dimension is between two and three.... read more >>

Quaternions are generalizations of the complex numbers that have found applications in computer graphics and many other fields.... read more >>

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 >>