As of mid-October 2014, I am the new faculty representative to the Midstates Consortium for Math and Science from Hope College. Over Halloween weekend, I traveled with five Hope students to the Midstates Constortium’s Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Physical Sciences, Math, and Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. The Midstates Consortium also runs … Continue reading
Statistics and the Great Lakes
Brian Yurk and I will be team teaching a new course Statistics and the Great Lakes at Hope in fall 2014. Before classes start, our class will spend three days on the wonderful beaches of Lake Michigan gathering data on Pitcher’s thistle, an endangered plant found only on sand dunes in the Great Lakes, at … Continue reading
The Hope College Mission Statement
Just for fun, I made a Wordle (word cloud and scalar histogram) of the Hope College mission statement. I think it reveals a lot about what we do and what we value most at Hope College. Link to Hope College Mission Statement Wordle (you may need to click on the title of this posting before … Continue reading
The Connective Real K-theory of Brown-Gitler Spectra accepted for publication
My paper “The Connective Real K-theory of Brown-Gitler Spectra” was published in Algebraic & Geometric Topology. This paper calculates ko_*(B(n)) and the mod 2 Dieudonne ring and Hopf ring for connective real K-theory.
Visualizing Clusters in Artificial Neural Networks Using Morse Theory is now published
My paper Visualizing Clusters in Artificial Neural Networks Using Morse Theory is now published in the journal Advances in Artificial Neural Systems. This paper uses the Mapper method from topological data analysis to visualize the clusters in a high dimensional data set that has been “learned” by a feedforward multilayer perceptron artificial neural network.
MAA PREP workshop on Problem Authoring in WeBWorK has started
The first online workshop for learning how to author WeBWorK problems was delivered by Davide Cervone (Union College), Gavin LaRose (University of Michigan), John Travis (Mississippi College) and me (Paul Pearson at Hope College) this past Monday. The first workshop covered Perl and PG and how to write a basic WeBWorK question. There will be … Continue reading
WeBWorK code camp at Ann Arbor
It was an intense and fun weekend for WeBWorK developers who attended the code camp at Ann Arbor this past weekend. I was mostly involved in the project to create a new WeBWorK model course for Ordinary Differential Equations. The people who helped me with editing and updating ODE’s questions from Miami University of Ohio … Continue reading
MAA PREP workshop “Authoring Effective Homework Problems With WeBWorK” approved
The workshop Authoring Effective Homework Problems with WeBWorK, for which I am one of four program directors, was approved by the MAA’s Professional Enhancement Program (PREP), which is partially funded by the NSF. Participants in this series of five online workshops during the month of June 2013 will develop the technical skills necessary to identify, … Continue reading
MathFest 2012
I gave two presentations at MathFest 2012 in lovely Madison, Wisconsin. In the special session on applied algebraic topology, I gave an invited talk on gene clustering. In that talk, I discussed joint work with Michele Intermont and Mark Pearson on using the Mapper algorithm from topological data analysis to identify putative operons in E. … Continue reading
Code camp (WeBWorK::Winona)
I’m attending WeBWorK::Winona code camp for WeBWorK developers from Aug. 5th to 8th. Aaron Wangberg, Alina Duca and I are working on performing statistical analyses of WeBWorK data and visualizing the results. During the code camp, I wrote code that generates a bar graph (in scalable vector graphics format) of some of the statistics on … Continue reading
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