My name is Jeremy Kun. I’m currently a mathematics PhD student at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and I did my undergraduate at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in mathematics and computer science. I have a thorough background in computer science, but my most exciting experiences there always stemmed from elegant (and uncoincidentally mathematical) solutions to programming problems. This blog is a presentation of the interesting solutions I come across, and an exploration of the deeper mathematical ideas therein. Most often this means exploring the mathematical structure of a problem to lubricate the cogs of algorithm design. In seldom cases, this involves using programs to reason about mathematical theory.
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For potential employers, grant-givers, or research partners, think of this blog as a three-fold portfolio: it contains code I’ve written in multiple languages, has a wealth of technical writing samples, and displays my ability to integrate and explain (or intentionally simplify) ideas from various mathematical and software fields. Most of the work on this blog has followed the recipe:
- Stumble upon a topic that sounds fascinating, or become fed up with my own ignorance of some area of mathematics or programming, or come up with an original question or idea.
- Read books, papers, blogs, and watch lectures online about the topic.
- Come up with a small software project that uses the idea in a nontrivial way.
- Write a main content post explaining and demonstrating the project.
- Write a primer post explaining the background mathematics.
- Look for ways to expand, generalize, or relate the idea to projects past and forthcoming.
While I don’t put my largest software projects here (indeed, I feel a large code base would take away from exploring relationships with mathematics), there are plenty of examples of my own written code. I include snippets in my main content posts, and include the entire source for each project on this blog’s Google Code page. This includes the programs I use to generate images and animations. While I usually implement my projects in Python or Mathematica, this blog includes projects written in C++, Java, and Racket, among others. I focus on readability over speed, as this blog focuses on comprehension and novel ideas over industrial-strength solutions.
Here are some other of my online profiles:
Math ∩ Programming by Jeremy Kun is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
You’ve been doing a great job here! Congrats for your initiative.
Thanks! Now that I’m in graduate school I’m finding less and less time to work on it. Luckily next semester I’m gearing my courses toward topics that are quite blogworthy.
Thank you very much for your blog. I enjoy it. Bookmarked
You have an excellent blog. Thank you very much for organizing and presenting all this information.
Your Have amazing blog. thank you ; I enjoy it
Excellent work ! Thanks for all the posts .. Please keep it up ..
Nice blog. Simple and interesting. This stuff is incredible.
Jeremy – I enjoy reading your Math Blog, and would like to respectfully ask a question.
I was wondering if you had ever done any research on buying
mathematical algorithms vs. programming them yourself? Especially for complicated
mathematical subroutines, is it cost effective to subscribe to an algorithm library
(like http://www.nag.com) for about $3000 per year, or let your programmers do all the work?
Have you ever offered an opinion on this subject (or anyone else)?
Thanks, Steve Chastain
That is a good question, especially because I’ve never heard of the concept of ‘buying algorithms’ being implemented before. In particular, an algorithm isn’t copyrightable material, so what they’re really selling you is either 1. a particular implementation with special features, or 2. their interface or service in deployment, support, and maintenance of said implementations. That’s how companies like Wolfram Research get away with charging for their wonderful Mathematica language.
Of course, I’m going to be critical because I study the mathematical background and implement the algorithms for fun, and I wish all my friends and their mothers did too. But I do believe that the methods which have stood the industry test of time will always be open source, and before you go to pay for a software implementation, it’s cost-effective to attempt to integrate such a library into your own code. I think, at the very least, open source libraries suffer orders-of-magnitude more scrutiny than something like NAG, and hence are bound to have fewer bugs.
To answer your question more directly: if you can, don’t pay for it and don’t implement it either. The optimized versions of these basic techniques have gone through decades of scrutiny to arrive at their present states, and you shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel for a real-world application. Instead, stand on the shoulders of giants, and realize that most giants which are accepted as ‘useful to stand on’ are free.
Looking at NAG’s webesite, it looks like the majority of the algorithms they offer are as such. For instance, their C library touts a Fast Fourier Transform, but the numpy library has the same routines, and more (NAG doesn’t support > 3-dimensional FFT). Furthermore, there is no mention of a parallelized version of the FFT, despite their emphasis on high performance computing and the existence of the industry standard Fastest Fourier Transform in the West again being free, open-source, and implemented in all the same languages.
Even more curiously, it seems that a number of their linear algebra routines are taken directly from LAPACK and BLAS, both free and open source linear algebra libraries specifically oriented for massive parallelism and used regularly in exascale computing applications. Many of their other listed algorithms seems pretty standard too. Although I don’t have much knowledge in statistical computing, I’m certain that the R programming language is far more capable than anything they have under statistics and nonparametric methods. Similarly, most nonlinear optimization techniques, including their packaged forms as the commonly used Support Vector Machine, are widely available. This reinforces my notion that their main service is support, and not the algorithms themselves.
That being said, I have never seen a black-box approach to mesh generation, and they list that as one of their features. As far as I know (and I currently see this everywhere in my work at LLNL), efficient mesh computation on nontrivial geometric shapes is highly problem-specific, and largely an open problem.
I also think it really depends on the focus of your software team and how cutting-edge the techniques are. If your devs are resistant to read a potentially dense paper on some new technique (and I’ll admit it, most papers are impossible to read), then hiring outside talent would allow your employees to focus on the work they enjoy instead of banging their heads against a wall over what can often be bunk or outdated research. It’s a philosophical debate for whether I should reimplement the algorithm or use a library, but for you it may easily be about team welfare.
Did that answer your question?
Hi Jeremy, I have (or would like to have) a similar background as you. I am finishing up my Bachelors in Mathematics from a local public university, but have a lot of expirience in IT and also in programming various fun mathematical based things for myself. I have long been interested in the “mathematical aspect” one could say of finding solutions or algorithms to problems and the analysis of them.
Anywhozel, I really enjoy your blog (a friend just sent me a link to it), and hope one day to find myself as far along in my education as you.
regards,
You really should compile a lot of this stuff into a book of some kind. I would buy it in a second. So would many others, I am sure.
I would buy it too!
Maybe you will find MathJax (Javascript LaTeX Interpreter) interesting. It makes you able to write Math in both MathML and LaTeX syntax directly in the html. Everything is handled by javascript. Which means that there will be pretty math without having the trouble of generating and uploading images.
Unfortunately I’m not hosting my own page, and wordpress doesn’t allow any javascript to be run on their pages for security reasons. But I have heard MathJax is nice.
Maybe it depends on the version of WP you are using? I read that wordpress.com does support Latex http://en.support.wordpress.com/latex/ and this is a plugin I found for Latex http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/latex/ that can either use MathJax or Latex image server if you have JS turned off.
Great blog! I studied math for my degree and masters, covering pure, applied and applicable for two years before specializing in pure and finally analysis (especially Banach Algebras). I had also programmed for many years and after masters went into programming business. So! the intersection of math and programming is really cool for me.
PS Did you read about the automatic math proof generator that Tim Gowers and Mohan Ganesalingam programmed whose output is close to human written proofs? Very interesting work http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/answers-results-of-polls-and-a-brief-description-of-the-program/
Ive been reading your blog for the past couple of months. Thanks for this is great resource.
Might I suggest adding it to google “currents” would make the reading on a tablet much nice
https://www.google.com/producer/currents
Good call. I never knew this was an opt-in kind of thing. EDIT: Looks like I have to be able to “verify” that I own this website in order to publish on Currents. Since WordPress owns the domain and I don’t have access to the HTML headers, looks like I’m out of luck.
Hello j2 this is a great blog, which I reached via your StackExchange contributions. I just read and much appreciated your hitchhikers guide to mathematics for programmers (joke):
http://jeremykun.com/2013/02/08/why-there-is-no-hitchhikers-guide-to-mathematics-for-programmers/
My PhD is in proof-theory with a cs flavour but that was many years ago; I went on to research in machine-assisted formal reasoning with Burstall and Fourman at LFCS in Edinburgh and then taught CS at Sheffield Uni for a decade or so. I now work as a maths teacher with the Open University and have a very new 1-man band software consultancy business (too new to have a proper website yet). I’m learning and using F# and loving it; I’ve been around the block with a number of FP languages and F# is really up to scratch. [I don't mean that it is as good as the language "scratch" (http://scratch.mit.edu/) :-] But my favourite platform is Mathematica and I use it daily for teaching, exploring, musical investigations, simulating, designing, accounting, drawing, mapping, testing out new programming language features. I use their browser plugin for interactive/animated content; see
http://fairflow.org/wpOU/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Lissajous1.cdf and use the slider or animation controls. But I guess you know about this already?
I didn’t mean you know about my little animation: i meant you know about cdf and the plugin!
great blog, do you have a facebook association also?
Hey great blog, I really enjoy your posts!
Any advice you could give to a current undergrad student who likes both Math and Computer Science on how to define possible graduate school research areas? I’m currently doing research at my university but I don’t think that’ll give me a good enough overview of all possible research areas. Thanks in Advanced and agan Great Blog!
It honestly depends on what you like. How much math have you done (in coursework or on your own)? How much CS? What topics are you most interested in?
Perhaps I should also say, my institution (UI Chicago) is looking for more Mathematical Computer Science graduate students. It’s more focused on the mathematical areas of CS (algorithms, data structures, learning theory) than the applied areas (systems, networks, security), but I think it’s a great department. And if you like the engineering aspects more, UI Urbana-Champaign is a great school for that too.
On the Math side I have taken Abstract and Linear Algebra, and am currently taking ODEs. On the CS side I have taken Data Structures, Computer Architecture and am currently taking Databases. I’ve been doing research in Finite Fields for a couple semesters now.
There’s a couple topics that interest me, but since I haven’t had much exposure in them I’m not really sure if I’m completely interested. These topics include: Algorithms, Machine Learning, Theory of Computing and AI.
Any advice on how to expand my knowledge on possible research fields, or finding out exactly what field I like the most is appreciated. Thanks again!
Heck, I say take as many classes as you can in all of these topics. If you’re interested in finite fields and abstract algebra, I’d image you’d enjoy theory of computing and the followup would be computational complexity theory. Algorithms is definitely essential. I personally hate differential equations (and I know nothing about PDEs), and it doesn’t appear to affect my work at all.
Machine learning theory is a very hot field right now, and it sits at the crossroads between probability theory, computational complexity (part of the theory of computing), and game theory. It would be a comfortable middle between theory and applications, if that’s what you like. Two big names in that field are Kearns and Vazirani, and they have a lot of survey papers and books you can get to introduce you to the field. On the other hand, there are loads and loads of interesting topics just in complexity theory, and there’s no shortage of open questions. In fact, a lot of important arguments there rely on facts about finite fields, so you’ll get to see some interesting applications there.
I think if you’re interested in going to graduate school you don’t have to pick a field now. I don’t think anyone is expected to know exactly what they want to do right away, but should know that there’s at least one topic they would enjoy studying. If you want, you can pretend in your application that you know exactly what you want to do, and nobody will hold you to it if you change your mind later. Having this finite fields research under your belt will help you a lot with that. If you are looking at schools and you contact a professor you’re interested in working with (and you can start that as early as you want, if you can manage to understand some of their papers), then they can give you a better idea of what their topic would be like.
A friend of mine sent me a link to your blog. And within a glance I was overwhelmed with the content of your blog. You put a great quality in information, plus detail explanation and demo.
I never take blogging seriously until I come to your site. Maybe I should start blogging interesting things I find, and open that knowledge with other people like you did. Great job, and truly adorable, Jeremy!
Thanks by this useful information, are really interesting some of the topics described in this blog. I hope you continue sharing these pieces of science
. Greetings from México.
Hi Jeremy,
My name is Kevin Gillespie, & I live in Wales. Pleased to meet you.
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I am now ‘Following’ your Blog.