As part of the program chair’s report for POPL 1992, Andrew Appel wrote a paper titled “Is POPL Mathematics or Science?” His paper measured how theoretical a conference is using the author ordering of the papers published. While this paper was meant to “provide some laughs”, I thought it was very interesting and reproduced the results for both the same data and for present-day programming languages conferences.
Most of what we publicly show of ourselves is positive. This can give others the impression that they are the odd one out, who has failures when everyone else only seems to succeed. But in reality, everybody fails—we simply hide the failures. This CV of failures aims to make my efforts more transparent, and to provide a more balanced perspective on my career.
In August I tried to abandon the concept of the days of the week.
Coinduction is the mathematical dual to an indispensible mathematical tool: induction. While mathematical induction has been known for thousands of years, coinduction has only been studied for a few decades. It is still primarily used in computer science, from which it originated in the field of concurrency theory. Coinduction allows us to define circular or infinite objects (such as streams, lists that can be infinitely long), and to prove things about them.
Welcome to my blog! This is the first (official) post, hopefully of many.