Author Archives: Brent

About Brent

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

New baby, and Haskell Alphabet

Posted on September 21, 2017

My wife and I just had a baby! If you missed seeing me at ICFP, this is why. In honor of my son’s birth (he will need to learn the alphabet and Haskell soon)—and at the instigation of Kenny Foner—I … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, meta | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

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 , , , , , | 2 Comments

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 →

Posted in meta | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

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