UCLA's New Undergraduate Major in "Data Theory"

At @UCLA (joint between the Math & Stats departments), I helped design a brand new, very exciting Data Theory undergraduate major.

Courses: https://t.co/z27ZJybKQj

To look up course identities: https://t.co/cHcYrQzVcH

Catalog listing: https://t.co/MMOfGX4Cf4 pic.twitter.com/ZZA4E1G8tE

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) August 1, 2019

Adventures With Old Caltech Catalogs

The 1974–1975 Caltech catalog was the first one to include the unit requirements for all* options in "modern" form (where "modern" means that's how it was when we arrived as frosh).

And in that catalog, Applied Math and Math required 483 units, and each of the other options required 516 units. (So then at some point that 516 was changed to 486. So Applied Math and Math were the pioneers!)

In prior years, each option (perhaps with some commonality due to influence of Divisions) essentially listed the requirements in their own format (occasionally including the modern format). Some of them listed required unit numbers (e.g., 530), but they were different for different options. Applied Math in 1973–74 required 537 units, but Math didn't list any one number in this format (though one could compute a minimum based on other types of requirements, such core courses, electives, and units per term). So somehow for 74–75, Applied Math and Math decided to be different from everybody else (naturally).

* except for the "Independent Studies Program", which is understandably much less structured in the catalog

Note: See this discussion for further background.

Note 2: I majored in Applied Math at Caltech. I graduated in 1998, and I first enrolled there during the 1994–95 school year.

This was really bugging me. Now I'll get back to what I was supposed to be doing.

Long Live the Matlab Billiard Simulator!

A couple of undergrads, Caitlin Keady and Sam King (who were in an REU and worked with my fellow former Georgia Tech postdoc Mark Demers for a summer project at Fairfield University), decided to update our old billiard simulator to be compatible with the 2016a release of Matlab. (I used it successfully on the 2016b release of Matlab.) They also added both new examples and new types of plots. You can download their version from the Matlab file exchange website.

Some people have still been using this software even though it's been 12 years since our original release—my former undergrad Steven Lansel did this in one of the first undergrad projects I supervised, and in 2006 on Kris Kazlowski updated the software—and even though things had gotten to the point that they were required to use a several-year-old version of Matlab. But now the billiard simulator is up-to-date again!

We certainly didn't think that people would still be using our software so many years later.

Somerville Mathematics Undergraduate Brigitte Stenhouse Wins Dissertation Prize!

Somerville mathematics undergraduate student Brigitte Stenhouse (who just graduated this year) won a Gibbs dissertation prize for her thesis on Mary Somerville! This is a best-thesis prize for Oxford's 4th-year mathematics and statistics (and sometimes computer science) students.

Today Somerville College posted a press release about Brigitte's prize along with a short interview of Brigitte, who plans to get a Ph.D. in the history of mathematics but is first working for a year in Somerville's development office. Here is my favorite quote of Brigitte's from the interview: It made me question why we value the mathematics we do, why we learn the mathematics we do in school and university, and why it is all named after Cauchy.