The latest issue of the e-journal, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, has a nice summary article by Michael Huth on his work using topology for computer program semantics (vol. 161, pp. 3–23, 2006).
Author Archives: PeterMcB
Hold the front page!
Today’s Guardian, one of Britain’s leading national daily newspapers, has a front-page story and photo about Grigory Perelman’s proof of a generalization of the Poincare Conjecture. The article is more about the man than the mathematics, but I guess this is the price of a Page-1 story.
Logic and computer science
Logician Solomon Feferman, who did his PhD under Alfred Tarski, has just written a short article on Tarski’s influence on computer science. It seems that this influence was wider than just that between cylindrical algebras and relational database theory.
Laws of Form and Bigraphs
Alerted by a post of sigfpe, I learnt about George Spencer-Brown’s 1972 book Laws of Form. Reading Louis Kauffman’s account of the theory, I was struck by the similarity to Robin Milner‘s theory of bigraphs (see here for papers). From a talk I heard him give a few years ago, I believe that Milner’s theory was originally intended as a rigorous category-theoretic account of hyperlinks in computer networks. Has anyone explored the connections between these two mathematical theories?
Data visualization software
Statisticians among us may be interested in Gapminder, free data visualization software from Sweden developed originally to assist in communicating information about global development. The software makes use of web animation tools such as Flash.
Plus magazine #39
The latest issue of Plus Magazine is now out, with articles about Godel and NASA.
Wanted: game theorists
The University of Liverpool (UK) has a vacancy for a post-doc researcher and for a PhD student, both in automated mechanism design. The expertise we are looking for includes game theory, mechanism design and auction theory, mathematical economics, and computational versions of same. These posts are part of a major UK research project on market-based control of complex computational systems.
LMS Popular Math Lectures
For readers in the UK, the London Mathematical Society (LMS) is offering two lectures on popular mathematics in London and Birmingham this summer. Â
Mathematics and art
The AMS has a new page devoted to mathematics and art.
Win an iPod for writing about math
Plus Magazine has a competition for new writers about mathematical subjects.