Monthly Archives: February 2020

What would Dijkstra do? Proving the associativity of min

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Brent

This semester I’m teaching a Discrete Mathematics course. Recently, I assigned them a homework problem from the textbook that asked them to prove that the binary operator on the real numbers is associative, that is, for all real numbers , … Continue reading →

Posted in math | Tagged , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Competitive Programming in Haskell: modular arithmetic, part 1

Posted on February 15, 2020 by Brent

Modular arithmetic comes up a lot in computer science, and so it’s no surprise that it is featured, either explicitly or implicitly, in many competitive programming problems. As a brief aside, to be good at competitive programming it’s not enough … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Unexpected benefits of version control

Posted on February 11, 2020 by Brent

Last night I dreamed that I had shaved off my mustache, and my wife was not happy about it. But in the dream, I couldn’t remember when or why I had shaved. Suddenly, it occurred to me: when I merged … Continue reading →

Posted in humor | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Competitive Programming in Haskell: primes and factoring

Posted on February 7, 2020 by Brent

Number theory is a topic that comes up fairly regularly in competitive programming, and it’s a very nice fit for Haskell. I’ve developed a bunch of code over the years that regularly comes in handy. None of this is particularly … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments