Here are some of the books I’ve mentioned in blog posts this year. One of these books may be just the present for a geek in your life. This post looks at technical books: math, science, engineering, programming. I’ll have a follow-up post with non-technical books I’ve written about. (Update: here’s the non-technical list.) Programming Book […]
Anthony Scopatz did an interview for Podcast.__init__ recently talking about xonsh, a command shell that blends Python and some traditions from bash. One line from the interview jumped out at me: … thinking very critically about what shells get used for and what they’re actually good at and what they’re not good at. I’ve wondered about […]
A few weeks ago I got a message on Twitter saying that IBM’s Watson had identified me as an “influencer” and invited me to the company’s Insight 2015 conference. So that’s where I am this week. I had a brief interview last night. Someone took this photo as we were setting up.
Jordan Ellenberg’s parents were both statisticians. In his interview with Strongly Connected Components Jordan explains why he went into mathematics rather than statistics. I tried. I tried to learn some statistics actually when I was younger and it’s a beautiful subject. But at the time I think I found the shakiness of the philosophical underpinnings […]
“Tate helped shape the great reformulation of arithmetic and geometry which has taken place since the 1950’s.” — Andrew Wiles At the Heidelberg Laureate Forum I had a chance to interview John Tate. In his remarks below, Tate briefly comments on his early work on number theory and cohomology. Most of the post consists of […]
When I interviewed Daniel Spielman at this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum, we began our conversation by looking for common mathematical ground. The first thing that came up was orthogonal polynomials. (If you’re wondering what it means for two polynomials to be orthogonal, see here.) JC: Orthogonal polynomials are kind of a lost art, a topic […]
Seth Juarez quipped in an interview that when people say they’ve got something “down to a science,” they probably don’t mean what they’re saying. Science is about making guesses and testing to see whether they’re right. Related post: Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy
Comment by Simon Peyton Jones in an interview: People often dislike static type systems because they’ve only met weak ones. A weak or not very expressive type system gets in your way all the time. It prevents you from writing functions you want to write that you know are fine. … The solution is not […]
In this post I interview Greg Greenlaw, a friend of mine who served as a missionary to the Nakui tribe in Papua New Guinea and developed their writing system. (Nakui is pronounced like “knock we.”) JC: When you went to PNG to learn Nakui was there any writing system? GG: No, they had no way […]
Why would anyone care about what the weather was predicted to be once you know what the weather actually was? Because people make decisions based in part on weather predictions, not just weather. Eric Floehr of ForecastWatch told me that people are starting to realize this and are increasingly interested in his historical prediction data. […]
