Natural Blogarithms

In addition to my previous post about Teaching Philosophy, I have also been working on a Research Statement. I am posting it here for me to refer back to in later months or years, so I can see how things might have changed.
My Research Interests
My primary areas of research interest lie in numerical analysis, [...]

Here’s a question I’ve never asked before today but now I know the answer. When you are shopping online and you enter a credit card number into a form, how do they know that it is a valid credit card number? I always imagined that they were immediately checking the number against some [...]

I finally hacked it. (see previous post). During a road trip to watch the basketball teams play in OK City, I finally discovered the problem with the code where we were using a nonlinear optimizer to determine the optimal portifolio by minimizing a quantity called, “Value at Risk.” Basically, the problem boiled [...]

I love teaching mathematics! (Good day)

Vector products are non-associative. Apparently a neuron misfired as I wrote out the properties for the cross product of two vectors. Fortunately, one student was on their toes and asked, “Are there more properties than are in the textbook?” To be honest, there are but the one of the ones I [...]

(Reminds be of the Paul Simon Song, 50 ways to leave your lover)
Anyways, that exclamation point in the title is not intended to convey excitement on this post, but the factorial of an integer . Recall that . I was surprised to learn there are so many ways to compute it: [...]

I’ve created another blog that a few of my readers may be more interested in. The content on Natural Blogarithms will continue to be a mix of math, education and faith. I am moving my personal entries regarding family and parenting stuff over to a new blog. Check it out, if you [...]

One of the things I spend most of my time on as an applied mathematician is implementation. In other words, I program computers, ranging from simple macros in Excel to scripting in MATLAB to compiler languages such as C (or C++) and FORTRAN to, my favorite, parallel implementations in GRID environments. The most [...]

Here is an interesting article that highlights the demand for math majors in industry. It’s a little long but worth the read for math enthusiasts.
Math will rock your world
HT: Homeschool Math Blog

I am not a huge fan of blonde jokes, but every once in a while one tickles me. This just might be the greatest blonde joke, ever.