After Math

I have been studying algorithms to compute the Levenshtein edit distance between two strings, which is defined as the minimum number of “edits” required to transform one string into another string.

A brief history of the Pratt parsing algorithm The history of programming language parsers is dominated by the thorny challenge of parsing expressions, mathematical expressions in particular, taking into account the precedence of operators in the expressi…

This article is an expanded version of the math part of an article I cowrote with marine biologist Dr.

This short article is for those students, programmers, and computer scientists who already have a basic idea of what a parser is and does but who want to know what that mysterious reference to “IELR(1)” means in the Bison parser generator manual.

In this third installment of our n part series, “Defining the Wolfram Language,” we begin to study the properties, namely the arity, affix, associativity, and precedence, of the Mathematica operators we found in Part 1.

In programming languages, an operator is a symbol used to represent a specific operation such as subtraction of integers or dereferencing a pointer.

Finding All Wolfram Language Operators In this second article, Part 1 of an n part series on Defining the Wolfram Language, we start getting our hands dirty hunting down every single operator in Mathematica and each operator’s linguistic properties.

What is the definition of the Wolfram Language?

Using computers to do automatic translation has a long and rich history in computer science.

In which I show you how to programmatically interface with a Mathematica kernel from Python.

Euclid in The School of Athens This is a very special fresco painting by Italian Renaissance artist Raphael in the Vatican Museum called The School of Athens.

The story begins with one of those little mundane activities that fill every professor’s day.

Do you need to ask your professor for an extension on a due date or to reschedule a quiz?

The Mathematics Community on Google+ had our second ever Hangout On Air last week.

No.

While the target audience of this article is my fantastic calculus students, other math teachers might enjoy it as well.

Susan Meisenhelder offers a scathing critique of MOOCs in her article “MOOC Mania” published in the latest issue of Thought & Action.

It’s over.

I love the exhibit hall.

The best part of the Joint Meetings is networking with like-minded people.

Today I learned about connections between musical rhythm and knot theory, abstract algebra and dance, a Navy ship from the mid 1800s called the U.S.S.

I am in Baltimore to attend the 2014 Joint Mathematics Meetings, the largest gathering of mathematicians in the world involving the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematics Association of America, and many other professional societies related to the…

A colleague who had been worried about one of her star students who had been missing from class for a couple of weeks came into my office.