Visiting Portland!

Woohoo! I’m headed to Portland in a few weeks to visit PSU — arriving on the evening of Thursday Feb. 14 and heading back on the morning of Sunday the 17th. So I’ll have two whole days in which to visit PSU, see the (by all accounts beautiful) city of Portland, and hopefully — which is the main reason for this blog post — squeeze in a chance to meet some cool Portlandites. If you’re reading this and you live in Portland, chances are that you count. =) Drop me a comment if you’d be interested in meeting up and hopefully we can work something out!

I’m also looking for a place to stay while I’m there — nothing fancy required, just a place to crash. If anyone would be willing and able to put me up for those three nights, I’d be immensely grateful. I could stay in a hotel, of course, but staying with someone would be a lot more fun, and a better opportunity to meet people.

Books!

Yay books! I am such a nerd. =) Here’s a list of the books I (or I and my wife) received for Christmas and my birthday:

Categories for the Working Mathematician, Saunders Mac Lane I’ve picked up lots of little bits of category theory here and there just from hanging out in the #haskell IRC channel, reading various papers, etc., but I decided I need to learn it formally for myself. I’ve already started this one, it’s pretty dense but I’m enjoying it so far.

Types and Programming Languages, Benjamin C. Pierce This is the area I’m interested in doing research in, so I’m trying to get a leg up on some of the fundamentals before I start grad school. It seems like a really great book so far (I’m on chapter 11 or something like that).

The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicles 2 and 4, Donald E. Knuth w00t! Knuth rocks.

Inversions, Scott Kim Scott Kim’s mathematically-influenced word art is amazing.

Proofs without Words: Exercises in Visual Thinking, Roger B. Nelson This is a neat book full of visual proofs. Hopefully it can provide me with some interesting material for my other blog.

The Golden Section: Nature’s Greatest Secret, Scott Olsen Ditto for this one. Also, Wooden Books (the publisher) makes really beautiful books — you can tell they pay a lot of attention to things like typesetting, layout, and materials.

Flight, Volumes 1 and 3, Various (Kazu Kibuishi, ed.) I can’t say I am some huge graphic novel fan or anything, but I really like these collections of graphic-novel-short-stories.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Dee Brown Got this one from my uncle, who always gives us interesting books. This one looks difficult, but interesting and important. I’m really looking forward to reading it in that this-probably-won’t-be-fun-but-it-will-be-good sort of way.