EMU math department blog

Last semester I wrote about Emacs Psychiatrist, a cute computer program that tries to have “intelligent” conversations with the user. If you talk to the program for several minutes, you quickly discover that it is not so intelligent. Can a more complicated computer program behave better? In computer science we use Turing test to test […]

CS 101/102 “Introduction to Computers” is offered every semester as an introductory course to non-majors. The title of the course is kind of misleading. We will probably have the name changed to “Introduction to Computer Science” instead.
Many people have flawed images for CS in their minds. In fact CS is much more exciting and fun […]

Congratulations to Dustin Good, who has been awarded the Brenneman-Longacher Endowed Mathematics Scholarship.  Dustin is a first-year student from
Harrisonburg, Virginia, who is double majoring in mathematics and computer science.  As the recipient of this scholarship, Dustin will receive $1250 per year for four years (starting with the 2007-08 year). 
The first two students chosen to receive the […]

Wondering around in Washington zoo last summer, I suddenly saw the name “EMU”. “How does EMU have anything to do with Washington zoo?” I was suprised, “Is the biology department running a joint project with the zoo?”. Looking carefully, I realized that it was EMU the bird, the largest bird native to Australia.

Out of curiosity, […]

Nathan Swatrentruber, Annette Lolchoki, and Paul Rutt did a nice little project in my software engineering class this semester. They worked on finding a solution to improve or replace the current EMU web survey software. According to EMU institutional research, the current software lacks many functionality and survey management features.
The group set up a […]

Donald Knuth is one of the computer scientists I admire. He has been called the father of algorithm analysis. His multi-volume books, The Art of Computer Programming, were first published in 1968 and still considered must-have in a theoretical computer scientist’s bookshelf. He is the creator of the Tex computer typesetting system, which I used […]

Graph theory is one of the topics in discrete mathematics. It is also important for a CS major to know some graph theory since many real-life problems concerning computer networks and computer circuit design are in fact problems in graph theory.
A planar graph is a graph that can be drawn on a piece of paper […]

Eliezer Hernandez (Senior, CS major), Michael Showatter (Sophomore, Math Ed major) and I formed a team called “EMU” to compete for the netflix prize.
Netflix offers one million dollar for an algorithm which is able to improve the performance of their current movie recommendation algorithm by 10%. They use the RMSE score to measure the performance […]

Stephen Wolfram is a famous theoretical physicist, mathematician, and computer scientist. He is the inventor of Mathematica. His ground-breaking book, A New Kind of Science, presents a new way, other than traditional mathematics, to model and understand the complexity of nature. I will write about this book in a future post. Today I would like […]

As we get into the second half of the semester and the winter is coming, you may feel a little bit down occasionally. What can you do to keep your spirit up? You may register a free session at EMU counseling service, or you may try to have a computer program be your counselor.
Emacs is […]