Dealing with the unexpected: William Kahan and the need for graceful exits
In a previous post, I took a trip down read-only memory lane with William Kahan. On the same trip, Kahan told me about his first commercial programming job.
Stories by Markus Pössel
A trip down read-only memory lane with William Kahan
I’ve already written here about the weirdness of certain floating point operations – the case of the misbehaving Excel spreadsheet in particular – taking my cues, and my examples, from floating point pioneer William Kahan (notably this set of slides [PDF])...
The creation of the Internet, privacy, and a geek joke: Interview with Vint Cerf
Giving in to a sudden impulse of vanity, this is what I believe to be the first selfie I’ve ever posted online. To be fair, we share responsibility for posting this picture on the Internet...
Applied Purity
There’s a well-known way of arranging fields of study according to “purity”. This xkcd cartoon shows how it’s done: It’s not surprising that those who are fondest of this simplified view are physicists and mathematicians, but that’s not the point I want to make...
Escaping the Confucian trap
We’re going to have quite a number of interesting laureates in town. But before we go live, so to speak, let me blog about a laureate who, sadly, couldn’t come.
The Meta Post to the 6 out of 200 series
One of many ways of characterizing the typical HLF attendee is probably the fact that, when faced with a blog article series called “6 out of 200“, their first reaction is not likely to be “oh, cool, let me read about six of the other 200 young researchers attending the meeting”...
“My brain is in town”
Paul Erdős was in many ways a mathematician’s mathematician – the most prolific researcher in mathematics in terms of article number, and legendary for the number of his collaborations...
