A Month of Math at the Boston Computation Club
Lots and lots of Algebra.
The Boston Computation Club just completed a solid month of mathematical content. We began on 5/7 with 📚 a mathematical review session, where we discussed first order logic, words and languages, FDAs, regular expressions, monoids (in particular, the free monoid and monoid morphisms), and metric spaces (and their completions - see also my & my father’s 🎙 very relevant discussion with Bryden Cais). The bit on first order logic hinted at 📜 Gödel’s famous theorems - a topic for another day!
Next, on 5/8, our friend & group member Cheng Zhang presented some of his research on 🧹 Kleene Algebras. The recording of this talk is not public, but is available upon request to group members.
We then moved swiftly onward to ⭐️ The Generalized Star Height Problem with Jean-Eric Pin, on 5/13. This was a small group with lively discussion throughout, and a very compelling, easy to understand (but evidently quite difficult to solve) research problem. You can …
This was an especially exciting event for me because Jean-Eric helped ignite my personal interest in formal methods and theoretical computer science, when I read his book 📗 Varieties of Formal Languages with Jay Taylor, who at that time was teaching at the University of Arizona as an undergraduate in mathematics.
Having exhausted our collective algebra knowledge, we concluded the month with two unrelated mathematical talks. First, Kimberley Ayers presented …
… Hybrid Systems: Not Just For 🚗s Anymore! on 5/20. You can watch Kimberley’s talk 📺 HERE, or listen 🎧 HERE.
This was exciting for me because I have a longstanding interest in hybrid systems and cyber-physical systems, and have spent quite a few hours reading relevant papers by authors like Rajeev Alur, Stanley Bak, Nancy Lynch, etc. Then, we concluded the month on 5/28 with an unrecorded talk by Albert Gu, titled 📉 Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces. Although Albert chose not to record his talk to us, he has recorded this same talk to other audiences before, e.g., 📺 HERE.
This sequence of back-to-back math talks was an absolute riot, and we will certainly hold math-heavy months like this again in the future. But not in the near future: rather, this Summer will contain more reverse engineering, more open conversations, and some off-the wall topics. Here’s a short preview of what’s on the horizon:
6/11: ✊🏽 An Open Discussion on Unionizing Graduate Students with Jacob Morrison and Jeremy Stepansky.
6/19: ♻️ Assessing Recycling, Displacement, and Environmental Impacts Using an Economics-Informed Material System Model with John Ryter.
7/29: 🦾 An Open Conversation on Reverse Engineering and Symbolic Execution with Boyan Milanov (of Trail of Bits).
8/06: 🤖 An Open Conversation on Reverse Engineering with Matteo Giordano (of rev.ng).
There’s more, including various as-yet-unscheduled events, on 🕸 the club website. If you’d like or present to join the club, email maxvh [ at ] hey [ dot ] com.
Here is an incomplete list of topics for which we’d love to host presentations in the near future: accessibility, exploit development, verification of cryptographic protocols, climate impact of blockchain, “how precisely do categories aid compiler developers?”, measure theory.