In the Introduction to Computer Science II, I’m planning on illustrating iterative numerical calculations by using an algorithm for approximating pi that was developed in the third century by Liu Hui and apparently used in the fifth century by Zu Chongzhi to calculate an approximation so precise that no one improved upon it for a millenium to come.  (This seems to be the longest any approximation to  pi ever has remained the record-holder, at least with the exception of 3, which was used so early as to be shrouded in the mists of time.)

In Computer Organization, I’m going to tell a story that definitely fits into the category of truth stranger than fiction.  A 17th century German Lutheran, collaborating with French Jesuits, becomes convinced not only that binary numerals express the perfection of God’s creation, but more remarkably that the Chinese had encountered the same truth thousands of years earlier.  In effect, the Chinese were Christians thousands of years before Christ himself!  (And, moreover, the Chinese emperor could be converted to Christianity if this were explained to him.)  Such, in the barest outline, is the story of Leibniz’s encounter with the Yi Jing, also known as the I Ching or the Book of Changes.

Finally, in Networking, we will follow up our discussion of network security by considering how broader conceptions of security–political and societal security–are realized through a combination of technical and non-technical means in various parts of the world.  Our example will be the control China exercises over the Internet, in which the technical filtering component is often called “The Great Firewall of China”.

Fibonacci, by Bethany Ringdal

They
don’t
march in
time, how I
thought I would find them;
these numbers slide, hum and nestle
in the pearly curves and coils of a poem in the sun.

Untitled, by Erik Alquist

Vote.
Please.
Cast with
Conviction
To send a message
Of preference or discontent.
Though with the plurality you may not be, have heart.
Choosing the loser of these contests beats waiting for a probability of 1.

Untitled, by Katie O’Bryan

guess
choose
who knows?
not anchors
nor politicians
who can predict, the oracle?
no, tis not the mystic but tis the statistician  

The featured photo is of Terry Morrison’s Needlepoint #2.  The following links lead to other photos from the exhibit: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

The concept of fuzzy sets is an attempt to capture the inherently imprecise linguistic concepts in terms of mathematical expressions. This became absolutely necessary in late sixties as the irresistible quest for imitating the human brain became a predominant issue in the scientific world. In essence, a thinking machine is not possible unless it comprehends the imprecise linguistic concepts.

Fuzzy sets were first conceptualized by Lotfi Askar Zadeh in 1965. Questioning the Aristotelian two valued logic, he proposed that the truth is not a matter of affirmation or denial but rather a matter of degree.

The talk will focus on the construction of the concepts from the basics and their mathematical ramifications.

Prof. Stephen Samuel is a UBCHEA scholar from India placed at the MCS Department of Gustavus Adolphus College.

Recently, one of Gustavus’s deans, Mariangela Maguire, told me she had received an email with a publicity photo for A Place to Bury Strangers, in which one of the band members is clearly wearing a “Gustavus Math Contest II” t-shirt with the three-crowns logo:

My first question was how old the shirt was; I knew it wasn’t recent. This question was answered by another photo on the web. Oliver Ackermann, the band’s guitarist, has a business building custom effects pedals, Death By Audio. On that web site, he is shown displaying a circuit board while wearing the t-shirt in question. This time his arms don’t obscure the year, 1980:

The next question is how a 1980 Gustavus t-shirt came to be on this young rock star. The last name serves as a clue; around that time, a guy by the name of Ernie Ackermann was on the Gustavus MCS faculty for a couple years. (He moved on to Mary Washington College, now the University of Mary Washington.) I checked with Ernie, and he confirmed that he had been co-organizer of the contest and had passed the shirt on to his son Oliver. He also pointed out that Oliver also performs in the shirt from the 1979 contest:

This group has received very favorable critical response to their album. (I downloaded it and enjoyed listening to it.) And they are going gangbusters touring; right now, they are at the massive South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, where they are playing no fewer than eight shows. Given that Oliver Ackermann seems to have a habit of performing in his Gustavus t-shirts, I like to think we may be getting some publicity in this world-class venue. [Update:We did! See photo 41 in this slideshow from SXSW.] Who would have thunk it! As an additional side-benefit of this story, Ernie and I had a coffee together today at a CS education conference we’re both attending. And Ernie sent me this adorable photo of Oliver wearing the 1979 shirt back at the time, when he was three:

Each submission should be a Fibonacci poem, which means that the number of syllables in each line should follow the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. (Each line after the first two contains as many syllables as the two lines before it put together.) In theory, a poem could continue beyond the 13-syllable line, but this is not recommended.

The goal isn’t just to count syllables, but to write good poetry. For some exemplary Fibonacci poems, Athena Kildegaard has allowed me to provide three of her poems to inspire you.

Submissions will be judged for merit by three experts from the Gustavus English Department: Joyce Sutphen, Philip Bryant, and Matthew Rasmussen. Each judge will rate each poem on a five-point scale. The sum of these scores (which could be as much as 15) will provide the bulk of the total points, although each poem will also be eligible for up to 3 bonus points for content.

Bonus points will be awarded based on this year’s theme for Math Awareness Month: the mathematics of voting. Poems that refer to mathematics or voting, but not both, will be awarded 1 bonus point. Poems that refer to both mathematics and voting, but not specifically the mathematics of voting, will be awarded 2 bonus points. Poems that refer to the mathematics of voting will be awarded 3 bonus points.

The three highest-scoring poems will be read at 7pm on May 1st in OHS 103, preceding the lecture by Francis Su on Voting in Agreeable Societies. The authors of these poems will be invited to attend and read their own poems; if they are unavailable, someone else will read for them. The winner will then be congratulated and presented with a $50 gift card for the Book Mark. The winning poem will also be posted to the MCS Blog.

All judges’ decisions are final. Only one poem may be submitted by each Gustavus student. By submitting a poem, you are agreeing that if it is a finalist, it can be publicly read and posted as described above. You retain the copyright and may publish the poem in any other way.

To submit a poem, send it by email to max@gustavus.edu by April 10th.

Visual motion detection is one of the most active areas in neuroscience today. In this paper, we investigate the mechanism of motion-detection in the fly’s visual cortex.

First, we investigate how the direction signals of the moving objects are encoded in the visual cortex of fly. Several differential equations are derived to model the dendrites which carry information to the tangential cells in the visual cortex of fly and to model the dynamics in the synaptic inputs.  By tracing the trajectory of the solution of one of the differential equations together with solving the other differential equations, a conclusion is drawn which can explain how the visual system of fly encodes the motion signal like the change of the direction.

In the second part of the paper, we study the mechanism underlying the “vector addition” as stated in “population vector” hypothesis.  Mathematical models are built for a descending neuron and two tangential cells.  Partial differential equations are derived and solved to find out the relation between the input and output of the descending neuron. We come to the conclusion that if the visual cortex of fly does perform vector addition, this ability should be mainly attributed to the special arrangement of the synaptic locations on the dendrites.

In the third part of the paper, a hypothesis is proposed about how the brain of fly reconstructs the motion trajectory based on the firing rates of the neurons in the brain.

In summary, by mathematical modelling of the visual systems in the fly, several conclusions are drawn which can be supported by the results obtained from biological experiments.  Hence, these mathematical models are close simulation of biological neural systems.

The field of medical research is one that is vast and growing. Researchers are pushing to find new ways to understand complex medical questions in virtually every field of medicine. My talk addresses how a recent graduate and entry-level employee fits into this research effort. I will discuss how the statistical analysis techniques I learned in college have been employed in an effort to answer those medical questions, as well as how various programming skills and techniques are used on a daily basis.