Camille Jordan (1838-1922)... read more >>

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. This is the seventh, and final, installment.... read more >>

Happy Pi Day, 3/14.... read more >>

Two days ago I wrote about random points in a square. At the last minute I added the paragraph asking about the generalization to random points in a cube. I have to admit that I didn't check the Web to see what was known about the question.... read more >>

How far apart can you expect two points chosen at random in the unit square to be? I found this problem on the YouTube channel maintained by Presh Talwalkar, Mind Your Decisions. He correctly calls it a very hard puzzle. At first, I guessed the answer might be $1/2$. But the correct answer is more interesting than that.... read more >>

I first encountered the Hilbert matrix when I was doing individual studies under Professor John Todd at Caltech in 1960. It has been part of my professional life ever since.... read more >>

Here is a classic puzzle. A pair of ladders leaning against the sides of an alley form a lopsided cross. Each ladder is propped against the base of one wall and leans against the opposite wall. If one ladder is 30 feet long, the other 20 feet long, and the point where they cross 10 feet above the ground, how wide is the alley?... read more >>

I am surprised when many of the singular values of a nonsymmetric variant of the Hilbert matrix turn out to be nearly equal to $\pi$. The explanation involves the Fourier series for a square wave.... read more >>

The Rosser matrix is a classic matrix eigenvalue test problem.... read more >>