Author Archives: Brent

About Brent

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

The Typeclassopedia is now up-to-date

Posted on June 7, 2017

The title pretty much says it all: I have finally finished (I hope) updating the Typeclassopedia to reflect various recent changes to the language and standard libraries (such as the AMP and BBP/FTP). Along the way I also added more … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, writing | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

Algorithms lecture notes and assignments

Posted on May 15, 2017

I just finished teaching our algorithms course for the second time. The first time around, last spring, I was always scrambling at the last minute to prepare for class, make new assignments, and so on (although I did have some … Continue reading →

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Submit to the Workshop on Type-Driven Development!

Posted on April 4, 2017

This year I am the co-chair (with Sam Lindley) of the Workshop on Type-Driven Development, affectionately known as TyDe1. The workshop will be co-located with ICFP in Oxford, and is devoted to the use of “static type information…used effectively in … Continue reading →

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Deep work and email habits: a followup

Posted on March 4, 2017

About six months ago I wrote a post about some new work habits I adopted, inspired by Cal Newport’s blog and by his book, Deep Work. First, I began scheduling blocks of “deep work” time during the week, when I … Continue reading →

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Signed sets and ballots and naturality

Posted on February 27, 2017

This is blog post #3 in a series on signed sets and ballots (the previous posts are here and here). Naturality, isomorphism, and equipotence When are two species isomorphic? Since species are, by definition, functors , the obvious answer is … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, math, species | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Signed sets and ballots, part 2

Posted on February 24, 2017

Recall, from my previous post, that our goal is to find a combinatorial proof showing the correspondence between signed sets and signed ballots, where a signed set is just a set of elements, considered positive or negative according to the … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, math, species | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Signed sets and ballots, part 1

Posted on February 20, 2017

The other day, Anders Claesson wrote a very nice blog post explaining a more combinatorial way to understand multiplicative inverses of virtual species (as opposed to the rather algebraic way I explained it in my previous post). In the middle … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, math, species | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments