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 […]
Leon Tabak
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 […]
Impressive achievements.
Computer scientists have created some of the most complex objects that human beings have ever designed and built. The largest programs contains tens of millions of instructions. If printed on […]
Every student, every professor.
I am guessing that a typical student at my small college studies with a quarter of the members of the faculty but sees little of the other three quarters. Could […]