Warm and fuzzy and orange all over

November 30, 2009

As seen at the Women’s Center on campus at Oregon State University (in the spirit of … is powered by Orange).

1

Donation price of anarchy

November 30, 2009
Tags: ,

I recently went to a Christmas party where, instead of a gift exchange, there was a donation exchange.  Essentially, we each placed a cause’s name into a hat, people draw the names and are asked to donate to the cause.  You may donate any amount you wish (including nothing if you are particularly opposed to [...]

3

nth Combinatorial Potlatch

November 23, 2009

The Combinatorial Potlatch is a semi-regular (which for last 7 years has been yearly!) one-day workshop in combinatorics held in Cascadia.  It is very informal (no name tags!), very relaxed (only three talks!) and runs on next to no funding*.  The latest installment was this past weekend in Vancouver, BC, held at Simon Fraser University’s [...]

4

Postdoc after postdoc after postdoc?

November 20, 2009
Tags: ,

There’s talk of postdocking* in the air – for one, Jonathan Katz posted about how to better match recent grads to postdoc positions. It looks like this year’s academic-job market is even worse than last and that postdocs might just fill in the gap for a year or two for some people – including those that are [...]

3

Mathworld v. Wikipedia

November 20, 2009

I was a mathematics undergraduate in the MathWorld generation.  It spread like wildfire in our department.  I stopped carrying textbooks around with me – instead I could just walk into our undergraduate lab and look something up.  MathWorld was every math textbook I needed.  (A friend of mine was blocked from MathWorld after trying to [...]

3

Algorithms for graph-constrained knapsack problems

November 3, 2009

Versions of this talk have been given at Oregon State University and the Combinatorial Potlatch.

Joint work with Brent Heeringa (Williams College) and Gordon Wilfong (Bell Labs)

0

Princesses can be mathematicians too

November 2, 2009
Tags:

[greets three tiny trick-or-treaters]
Them: Trick or treat!
Me: I see we have a puppy, Mickey Mouse and, well, you must be a mathematician!
Little girl [defiantly stomping foot]: I’m a princess!
Me: Princesses can be mathematicians too.

3