Genius at Play: John Conway’s biography by Siobhan Roberts
I was happy to stumble upon the new book on John Conway’s life and work Genius at Play while I was visiting the Museum of Mathematics in New York City. By the way, the museum is highly recommended. As I like to travel light, I did not buy the hard covered book, but instead bought…
NSERC
I was excited to be asked to serve on the NSERC DG’s Mathematics and Statistics Evaluation Group. For those not familiar with the Canadian academic grants scene, NSERC is the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, which holds annual competitions for grants for faculty in STEM disciplines. NSERC is part of the so-called tri-council, which includes…
The robot crawler number of a graph
Working with some bright undergraduates, we submitted a paper to the 11th Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web Graph (WAW’15). It is a pity I cannot make it this year owing to other responsibilities, especially since I have never been to the Netherlands. I haven’t missed WAW for many years. In fact, I have…
Pale blue dot
Given the historic New Horizon’s mission to Pluto, I reflected back on Carl Sagan’s famous quote concerning an image of Earth as seen from the Voyager 1 spacecraft 6 kilometers miles from home. Sagan greatly influenced the early direction of my career into mathematics and science. After reading this quote, no one can ever say that…