Jim Carlson's Home Page

RC | Start | Elm | Haskell | Music | Art | Type Theory | Futhark | Misc

What’s new:

• September 8, 2020. I will be participating in the Recurse Center’s fall program, September 21—December 11, 2020. Really excited about this. Have common interests with many of the participants and it will be a great opportunity to learn and work with others. See the RC section of this blog.

Current interests: Type theory (Martin-Löf, HoTT) and functional programming, mostly Elm and Futhark. Some projects:

• Building MiniLaTeX, a subset of LaTeX that can be rendered to HTML. The most interesting part is the parser-renderer, which is written in Elm. I’ve used it for some lecture notes and various other little projects.

• Learning Futhark, the awesome pure functional language that compiles to highly optimized GPU code. I’m writing notes on Futhark as my studies progress.

• Learning Type Theory. Absolutely fascinating, touching everything from philosophy to logic to mathematics to programming. What more could one ask for? Currently reading Programming Language Foundations in Agda, by Philip Wadler and Verified Functional Programming in Agda, by Aaron Stump. Both are based on Per Martin-Löf’s work and both give down-to-earth treatments of how to prove theorems using type theory.

• Occasional teaching: a Python Bootcamp for math and physics grad students. The basics, some modeling, simulation, and data analysis, e.g. earth’s temperature change, 1880 to present, Hubble’s original galactic recession data. Fourier analysis of birdsong (it is data too!): the Nightingale sings at F# 7, the highest F# on the piano keyboard. Monte Carlo methods. The students are great, and we are having a blast! Here are the syllabus and GitHub repo.

Various talks

• MiniLaTeX, Friday, June 9 at Lambda Conf 2019 in Boulder Colorado: Slides.key, Slides.ppt

• Tarring Files in Elm — a package written in pure Elm to tar and untar files. Oslo Elm Day, Feb 16, 2019. Wow, was the hospitality great!

• The MiniLaTeX Project, Carnegie Mellon University, Dept. of Computer Science, October 16, 2018

• Making a LaTeX to Html Parser in Elm — talk at Elm Europe, Paris, June 6, 2018.

Space-time coordinates

I’m a professor emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Utah, presently visiting the Ohio State University. For the last seven years, I have also held a visitig scholar position at BICMR, the Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research at Peking University. Next year (2019-20), I will be visiting the Collège de France in Paris. After that, back to New York City.

Points of contact

Now he is taller than me.

• Email: jxxcarlson at gmail
• Elm slack: jxxcarlson
• Twitter: @epsilon2178
• GitHub — Code!
• GitHub Pages — various apps, mostly in Elm.

Some links

• Curriculum vita — rather out of date, but I am still doing things (and, most importantly, new things)

• A Composition -

Footnotes (the best part!)

1. Nightingale has best birdsong because of its complex brain. Amazing what 4 billion years of engineering work can come up with.
2. Song of the nightingale (link to audio)
3. George Oakley, Sonata for Cello and Piano, Inga Kashakashvili, piano, and Jay Campbell, cello.
4. Dylan Carlson, piano. Salt Lake City 2010
5. Why the “xx” in “jxxcarlson”? Identifiers must be unique. Nothing to do with mathematics or with an excellent brand of Mexican beer, although both are in some sense applicable.
6. The bird: a red-throated flycatcher (Ficedula albicilla)