Author Archives: Brent

About Brent

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Hendrix College. Functional programmer, mathematician, teacher, pianist, follower of Jesus.

Hendrix teams at ACM ICPC

Posted on November 4, 2018

Today I took five students from Hendrix to Fort Smith to compete in the Mid-Central USA Regional of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Both teams solved five out of ten problems, and finished second and fourth out of … Continue reading →

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What’s the Difference? video and slides

Posted on October 20, 2018

At ICFP in St. Louis I presented my paper with Kenny Foner, What’s the Difference? A Functional Pearl on Subtracting Bijections. Many people seemed to enjoy the talk and we got lots of great feedback afterwards. We will probably write up … Continue reading →

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Counting inversions with monoidal sparks

Posted on October 6, 2018

Time for me to reveal the example I had in mind that led to the generalization in my previous post. Thanks for all the interesting comments: it seems like there are some interesting connections to be explored (e.g. to the … Continue reading →

Posted in math | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Monoidal sparks

Posted on October 1, 2018

While at ICFP in St. Louis this past week, I discovered an interesting construction on monoids that no one I talked to (including Kenny Foner and Edward Kmett) seemed to have heard of or thought about before. In this post I’ll … Continue reading →

Posted in math | Tagged , , , , | 23 Comments

New ICFP functional pearl on subtracting bijections

Posted on June 23, 2018

Kenny Foner and I have a paper accepted to ICFP on subtracting bijections. Here’s the basic problem: suppose you have a bijection between two sum types, , and another bijection . Of course and must have the same size, but … Continue reading →

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

Ertugrul Söylemez: 1985-2018

Posted on May 21, 2018

I do not know many details, but IRC user mupf joined the #haskell-ops channel yesterday to tell us that Ertugrul Söylemez died unexpectedly on May 12. This is a great loss for the Haskell community. Going variously by mm_freak, ertes, … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, meta | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Future of Coding podcast interview

Posted on May 19, 2018

I recently did an interview with my friend and former student Steve Krouse for his Future of Coding podcast. I think I still agree with almost everything I said, and I didn’t say anything too embarrassing, so if you want … Continue reading →

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