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| In 1969, the team that developed the ATM at IBM Hursley (UK) used parts from that project to build an IBM School Computer, as a community outreach project, and it toured the region. When it came to James Davenport’s school, he (at age 16) discovered that, although it was ostensibly a six-digit computer, the microcode had access to a 12-digit internal register to do multiply/divide. He therefore used this to implement Draim's algorithm from his father's book, The Higher Arithmetic, and was testing eight-digit numbers for primality until the teacher’s patience wore out. This is typical of Davenport’s lifelong interests: pushing computers to their limits to do mathematical computations. He worked in a government laboratory for nine months, again writing and using multiword arithmetic, but also using his knowledge of number theory to solve a problem in hashing, which earned him his first published paper at 18. He went to Cambridge University (Bachelor’s in 1974, Master’s in 1978, and PhD in 1980), to IBM Yorktown Heights for a year, back to Cambridge as a Research Fellow, to Grenoble for a year, which significantly improved his French, as well as his cooking, before going to the relatively new University of Bath “for a couple of years" in 1983. He is still there, though he has also spent time researching and teaching in many other countries. In 1986 in France, he finished his textbook Calcul Formel with Grenoble colleagues, which his mother translated into English as Computer Algebra. Computer algebra remains his main research interest: as he says, “You don't really understand a subject until you can program a computer do to it, and that goes for mathematics at least as much as anything else.” He is finishing a new textbook on the subject, and has also edited four volumes of conference proceedings on the subject, as well as writing over 100 refereed papers. He has also produced four new editions of The Higher Arithmetic. He is active in the UK's professional world as a vice-president of the British Computer Society, the representative of the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications on the London Mathematical Society’s Computer Science Committee, and a member of the Outer Circle of the National Advisory Committee on [School] Mathematics Education. In 2014, he was one of only two computer scientists chosen among the 55 national teaching fellows (and Tom Crick, the other one, had studied at Bath). Internationally, he is on the Committee for Electronic Information and Communication of the International Mathematical Union, and just moderated the panel on mathematical MOOCs at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians. Is he a mathematician or a computer scientist? “Yes, and if that were a conjunction rather than a disjunction, I would still say yes. What attracted me to Bath was that mathematics and computer science were one department, and when colleagues felt that growth made a split necessary, I was made a member of both departments.” What attracts him most to Computing Reviews is the ability to read books and papers he would not otherwise read. “We examine PhD students, not just on their thesis, but also on the broader area. How do we professors keep up ourselves? Reviewing for Computing Reviews is my way.” |
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1 - 10 of 38
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An autotuning protocol to rapidly build autotuners Liu J., Tan G., Luo Y., Li J., Mo Z., Sun N. ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing 5(2): 1-25, 2018. Type: Article
While autotuning has become a valuable tool for the high-performance computing (HPC) community to achieve “performance portability,” that is, the program runs on the new architecture correctly and with the expected ...
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Mar 7 2019 |
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An autotuning protocol to rapidly build autotuners Liu J., Tan G., Luo Y., Li J., Mo Z., Sun N. ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing 5(2): 1-25, 2018. Type: Article
While autotuning has become a valuable tool for the high-performance computing (HPC) community to achieve “performance portability,” that is, the program runs on the new architecture correctly and with the expected ...
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Mar 7 2019 |
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What can (and can’t) we do with sparse polynomials? Roche D. ISSAC 2018 (Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation, New York, NY, Jul 16-19, 2018) 25-30, 2018. Type: Proceedings
This is the paper version of Roche’s ISSAC 2018 tutorial, which serves as an update to my work [1]. It is an excellent tutorial, written in a clear and accessible style. ISSAC is to be commended for these tutorials, and I wis...
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Oct 10 2018 |
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Guide to pairing-based cryptography El Mrabet N., Joye M., Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, FL, 2016. 420 pp. Type: Book (978-1-498729-50-5)
In this context, a pairing is a bilinear map from two (not necessarily distinct) groups G1,G2 to a third. In cryptography, pairings are almost inevitably constru...
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Sep 27 2017 |
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Bitcoin and blockchain security Karame G., Audroulaki E., Artech House, Inc., Norwood, MA, 2016. 218 pp. Type: Book (978-1-630810-13-9), Reviews: (1 of 2)
This book is not for the faint-hearted: if you don’t already have a rough idea of what Bitcoin is, you won’t learn it here. Nor is it easy reading if you do have a rough idea: the book is poorly edited and has sever...
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Apr 13 2017 |
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Work-efficient matrix inversion in polylogarithmic time Sanders P., Speck J., Steffen R. ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing 2(3): 1-29, 2015. Type: Article
This paper is best motivated by the following observation (on p. 2). Currently, the fastest machine in the TOP500 list is rated at 16.3 peta floating-point operations per second (PFLOPS), which is achieved on matrices of dimension 12,6...
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Dec 9 2015 |
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Open problems in mathematics and computational science Koç Ç., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, New York, NY, 2015. 439 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319106-82-3)
As the editor quite rightly says, “Conferences are places where we get to see and hear about solutions. ... Rarely is there an opportunity to talk about problems that have not been solved yet,” but this is precisely...
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Oct 15 2015 |
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Fraction-free factoring revisited Middeke J., Jeffrey D. ACM Communications in Computer Algebra 48(3/4): 130-132, 2014. Type: Article
This is the abstract of a poster presented at the International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) 2014 dealing with Gaussian elimination over a ring R, and hence “fraction free,...
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Jul 16 2015 |
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Fraction-free factoring revisited Middeke J., Jeffrey D. ACM Communications in Computer Algebra 48(3/4): 130-132, 2014. Type: Article
This is the abstract of a poster presented at the International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) 2014 dealing with Gaussian elimination over a ring R, and hence “fraction free,...
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Jul 16 2015 |
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Python algorithms: mastering basic algorithms in the Python language (2nd ed.) Hetland M., Apress, New York, NY, 2014. 320 pp. Type: Book (978-1-484200-56-8), Reviews: (1 of 2)
Subject to the caution mentioned at the end of this review, I would use the earlier parts of this book to teach algorithms to a computer science introductory course using Python. The whole book would be a great support for an algorithm...
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Mar 12 2015 |
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