MIT's Professor Gil Strang gave two talks in one morning recently at the SIAM annual meeting. Both talks derived from his experience teaching a new course at MIT on linear algebra and neural nets. His first talk, "The Structure of a Deep Neural Net", was in a minisymposium titled "Deep Learning and Deep Teaching", which he organized. Another talk in that minisymposium was by Drexel's Professor Pavel Grinfeld on "An Informal Approach to Teaching Calculus." An hour later, Gil's gave his second talk, "Teaching About Learning." It was an invited talk at the SIAM Conference on Applied Mathematics Education.... 更多内容 >>

Here are the first 12 integers from an infinite sequence defined by a deceptively simple rule. Can you see the pattern? Try to predict the next number in the sequence.... 更多内容 >>

If you follow this blog regularly, you know that I love fractals. I recently spent a pleasant afternoon in Nashua, New Hampshire, where my daughter Teresa introduced me to Gregory Searle, a fractal artist and computer geek. Here is his logo.... 更多内容 >>

Today is Easter Sunday. Why? How is the date of Easter determined?... 更多内容 >>

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, SIGPLAN, expects to hold the fourth in a series of conferences on the History of Programming Languages in 2020, see HOPL-IV. The first drafts of papers are to be submitted by August, 2018. That long lead time gives me the opportunity to write a detailed history of MATLAB. I plan to write the paper in sections, which I'll post in this blog as they are available.... 更多内容 >>

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, SIGPLAN, expects to hold the fourth in a series of conferences on the History of Programming Languages in 2020, see HOPL-IV. The first drafts of papers are to be submitted by August, 2018. That long lead time gives me the opportunity to write a detailed history of MATLAB. I plan to write the paper in sections, which I'll post in this blog as they are available.... 更多内容 >>

Leslie Fox (1918-1992) is a British numerical analyst who was a contemporary of three men who played such an important role in my education and early professional life, John Todd, George Forsythe, and Jim Wilkinson. Although I saw less of Fox than I did of the others, he was still an important influence in my life.... 更多内容 >>

Three-term recurrence relations are the basis for computing Bessel functions. Contents A Familiar Three-Term Recurrence Friedrich Bessel Bessel Functions Miller's Algorithm ... 更多内容 >>

The first computer that I seriously used was the Burroughs 205 Datatron. I actually used two different machines, one at Caltech for two years in 1959-61 and one at the University of Utah in the summer of 1960. Both the technology and the style of usage were wildly different from today's computers.... 更多内容 >>

Do not get involved in a bar bet with Brad Efron and his dice until you have read this.... 更多内容 >>