Author Archives: Brent

About Brent

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

Types versus sets in math and programming languages

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Brent

For several years I have been designing and implementing a functional teaching language especially for use in the context of a Discrete Mathematics course. The idea is for students to be exposed to some functional and statically-typed programming early in … Continue reading →

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Competitive programming in Haskell: folding folds

Posted on June 19, 2021 by Brent

Now that the semester is over—and I will be on sabbatical in the fall!—you can expect a lot more competitive programming in Haskell posts. In a previous post, I challenged you to solve Origami. j0sejuan took me up on the … Continue reading →

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Average and median via optimization

Posted on June 8, 2021 by Brent

This is certainly not a new observation, and I’m sure it is folklore and/or contained in various textbooks, but it was amusing to derive it independently. Suppose we have a finite set of real numbers , and we want to … Continue reading →

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Competitive programming in Haskell: folding challenge

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Brent

As of this writing, I am the only person who has solved Origami on Open Kattis (see the problem statistics here). This is a shame since it is a very nice problem! Of course, I solved it in Haskell. I … Continue reading →

Posted in competitive programming, haskell | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Competitive programming in Haskell: cycle decomposition with mutable arrays

Posted on July 18, 2020 by Brent

In my previous post I I challenged you to solve Chair Hopping: if a bunch of people permute themselves according to the same rule twice, how many different rules could they be following which would result in the observed final … Continue reading →

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Competitive programming in Haskell: 2D cross product, part 1

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Brent

Time for some more geometry! In my previous post I challenged you to solve Cookie Cutters, which asks us to scale the vertices of a polygon so that it has a certain prescribed area. It’s possible to solve this just … Continue reading →

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Competitive programming in Haskell: data representation and optimization, with cake

Posted on June 29, 2020 by Brent

In my previous post I challenged you to solve Checking Break, which presents us with a cake in the shape of a rectangular prism, with chocolate chips at various locations, and asks us to check whether a proposed division of … Continue reading →

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

Competitive programming in Haskell: vectors and 2D geometry

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Brent

In my previous post (apologies it has been so long!) I challenged you to solve Vacuumba, which asks us to figure out where a robot ends up after following a sequence of instructions. Mathematically, this corresponds to adding up a … Continue reading →

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Anyone willing to help me get set up with something like miso?

Posted on June 9, 2020 by Brent

For the last few years I’ve been working (off and on) on a teaching language for FP and discrete math. One of the big goals is to build a browser-based IDE which runs completely client-side, so students can code in … Continue reading →

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

Competitive programming in Haskell: permutations

Posted on May 30, 2020 by Brent

In my previous post I challenged you to solve The Power of Substitution. This problem presents us with a substitution cipher, and asks how many times we would have to iterate the encoding process in order to turn a given … Continue reading →

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