October 1, 2013
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
Markus Pössel is a physicist turned science communicator. He is managing scientist of the Haus der Astronomie in Heidelberg, a center for astronomy education and outreach. The author of several books and numerous articles for a general audience, he has been blogging at Relativ Einfach since 2007, and was one of the bloggers-in-residence at the 2010 Lindau meeting. His main interest is in astronomy and astrophysics, particularly relativity and cosmology. Markus's previous experience includes ten years at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, where he started out as a PhD student and stayed on as an outreach scientist, among other things creating the web portal Einstein Online. In 2007-2008 he served as Senior Science Advisor to the first World Science Festival in New York City before moving to his present position in Heidelberg.
September 30, 2013
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]).
September 27, 2013
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.
September 20, 2013
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.
September 18, 2013
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.
September 17, 2013
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”.
September 16, 2013
“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.