Readings in computer science
What are some of the most important ideas in computer science? Whose character and work represents computer science especially well? If we could have only a day or two with […]
Leon Tabak
Open to the prospects of improvements in education
A colleague and I attended a lecture at ACT several years ago. The speaker was a visiting professor. He spoke about the use of computer programs to grade essays. Later, […]
Online learning
I spoke about online learning to Cornell College’s Science Interest Group on September 21, 2017. Here is the flyer that I used to advertise the event. Here are the slides […]
Distributed Version Control Systems
I spoke to the Eastern Iowa chapter of the Society for Technical Communications on September 12, 2017. Here is the flyer that the group used to advertise the meeting. Here […]
Lessons in “Hidden Figures”
The women whose stories are told in the movie “Hidden Figures” give us good examples of professional conduct. Some people have jobs and some people have a calling. The attitudes […]
Every step moved us closer.
A Poem for Science In 1959, Dutch pioneer of computer science Edsger Dijkstra published an algorithm that now routes e-mail and gives directions to drivers in GPS-equipped cars. Many beginning […]
What is a computer?
In the 1950s, soon after Univac, IBM, and other companies first began manufacturing computers, audiences saw computers in movies like Desk Set and Forbidden Planet. They recognized a computer when […]
Complexity.
For computer scientists, the word complexity denotes the amount of work required to solve a problem using a given algorithm. An algorithm is the sequence of arithmetic and logical operations […]
Computability.
For which problems do algorithms that generate a solution exist? This question defines the study of computability. A programmer can direct a computer to repeat a series of arithmetic operations […]
Notes on searching and sorting.
When a word processing program checks the spelling in a document, the program searches for matching words in a dictionary. When a customer enters the title of a book on […]