Michi’s blog

Restarting high school topology

• May 21st, 2008

My two high-school kids came by today. We’ve been trying to get a new teaching session together since early February, but they had a hell of a time all through February, and all our appointments ended up canceled with little or no notice; and then I spent March and April on tour.

We pressed on with knot theory. Today, we discussed knot sums, prime knots, knot tabulation, behavior of the one invariant (n-colorability) we know so far under knot sums, Dowker codes, and we got started on Conway codes for knots. Next week, I plan for us to finish up talking about the Conway knot notation, get the connection between rational knots and continued fractions down pat, and start looking into new invariants.

Parallel and cluster computing with MPI4Py

• May 18th, 2008

First off, I’d ask your pardon for the lull in postings - this spring has been insane. It has been very much fun - traveling the world, talking about my research and meeting people I only knew electronically - and also very intense.

To break the lull, I thought I’d try to pick up what I did last summer: parallel computing on clusters. It’s been a bit of blog chatter about SAGE and how SAGE suddenly has transformed from a Really Good Idea to something that starts to corner out most other systems in usability and flexibility.

Matlab? SciPy bundled with SAGE and the Python integration seems to be at least as good, if not better.
Maple? Mathematica? Maxima? Singular? GAP? SAGE interfaces with all those that it doesn’t emulate.

• FRA-Lagen och falska positiver  9
  Fredrik Reinfilth, Dag, Michi, Dag, Gustaf, Michi [...]
• A vision for collaborative mathematics platforms  7
  Dan Drake, Nathaniel Dean, Michi, Ben Webster, Nathan Dunfield, Joachim Breitner [...]
• AMS and mathjobs.org are made of awesome  2
  Michi, Ben Webster
• Restarting high school topology  1
  John Armstrong
• Tour dates  5
  sigfpe, Charles, John Palmieri, Michi, Charles
• Introduction to Algebraic Geometry (2 in a series)  1
  lhrrwcc

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