An introduction to the curves used to build physical things, especially to B-Spline curves and their properties.
One of my projects is to thoroughly digest Spivak's
Calculus on Manifolds by writing up my own set of notes, complete with
diagrams and solutions to every problem.
This blog documents my progress designing and building a perpetual calendar watch.
This is a new way to graph data, especially good for small numbers of points, or sets with sparse regions.
There is a clean and simple way to extend Euler's beautiful involute construction
to gears with skewed axes.
These are notes from a guest lecture I gave in 2012 to a linear algebra course at UT Austin.
Just checking that circles actually map to circles.
Some beautiful math comes from computing the flatness (aka width) of a collection of points.
How many ways are there to place rectangles against the same background grid?
This question comes up during page layout (web pages, magazine pages, etc).
These people are photographing me, and I am photographing them.
Various trinkets I've made.
Notes on some basic aspects of probability.
My enthusiasm for purchasing books outpaced my reading speed many years ago. The
idea here is to create some kind of web tool for keeping track of everything.
Dead reckoning on a motorcycle is tricky because the motorcycle leans during a turn.
A simple model of these dynamics allows for position updates
using gyroscope and odometry data.
A novel way to understand and quantify the shapes of curves, with application to
physical curves, such as protein molecules.
Dorian is a master mechanic, and the most talented and pragmatic mechanism debugger I have ever met.
I apprenticed in Dorian's shop as a teenager.
The Algebraic Ricatti Equation is a quadratic equation in matrices.
How does a coin spin on a table?
Does it slip, or does it roll without slipping?
Old notes, papers, teaching evaluations etc are all accessible here.
Maciej was my MS advisor in mathematics.
Oliver was my PhD advisor in mechanical engineering.
My mom photographs and documents urban coyote behavior.
My dad writes about French libraries and other topics.