Hi everyone, well if its mid October in France what time is it in New York? I haven't posted in a while, which I'm starting to say at the beginning of every single post, I have no real excuse. I've now been on two 'business' trips in the last two weeks, one day in Paris then a week in Nancy. I hinted before at how exciting my work is becoming, well the conference in Nancy took things to a new level. I've been working on an open-source computer algebra program called SAGE. It is essentially a community of mathematicians and computer scientists who are working on making a computer algebra system which is as fast as possible. So my area of expertize is factoring polynomials, you know, x^2+2, but much larger. So in my first attempt to start making factoring fast in SAGE I found a quick patch that took an existing algorithm and made it 4 or 5 times faster. Now I'm working with a C-library called FLINT which is really fast on basic arithmetic and we're working on getting all of the ideas of my dissertation into a fast and readily available implementation with it. I really believe in the concept of open-source math software, where if you want to know how the computer computes a Groebner Basis you can just follow the code until you see exactly which algorithm is being used. There's nothing hidden from anyone, but a company like Mathematica or Maple has a secret to guard, something that gives them competitive edge which is not at all in the spirit of education. So I'm working on SAGE, and it is really exciting to be a part of a community doing what I do!
In the website world we've been really busy, I learned a little PHP and mySQL so that the boys could have page counters, and after learning that it unlocked the door for installing something cool, like WordPress, on our site. So now at sara.novocin.com and novocin.com/marie there are actual professional looking blogs. Sara is going to be making a food blog, since we are trying tons of new foods and things here in France, and she'll keep pictures and recipices along with general what works what doesn't advice. I'm not too sure yet since we just installed it yesterday. You can make comments and all of the things normal blogs do. Not like my journal which is written using the most basic text editor there is and a little python script I wrote for giving the day and year in a pretty format, oh well, I'm a purist.
We've been making some friends here in France, which is pretty cool. Today we had a nice French lunch with some work buddies and then went to some open-house for newcomers to Montpellier. So now if we're so inclined we can play Bridge, Golf, or bowl with groups of locals. There was actually French conversations/grammar practice and cooking lessons, so who knows where that might take us. I also decided I'm gonna make a collection of the best Graffiti of Montpellier. It will be my version of photo journalism, showing you the street side of Mediterranean France. This might be a slow process since I really only do website stuff on the weekends, but Sara has been doing a good job of keeping things up to date during the weeks.
While I was in Nancy, Sara and I played boardgames online at Brett Spiel Welt, and Mike even played with us a couple times! It was nice because we played Settler's of Catan and I really have missed that game here in France. You can probably tell I'm not terribly inspired to write in my journal today, since I'm just laundry listing what I've done lately. Fine, I'll tell you about something more abstract that I've learned this week.
The job search: I just started here in France and now, all of a sudden, deadlines are fast approaching for all of next year's math jobs back in the states. So I have to start writing a research letter, a teaching letter, and get my CV into shape. On top of it we have to find a way to fly back to the states for the AMS joint meetings when all of the interviews take place, in an all-out-blitz of job searching. So we'll be in D.C. in January (5th-9th or so), and certainly we'll be swinging by Delaware and West Virginia (where Sara's parents are). I wish that these applications were just 3 months later, I'm learning/doing so much math right now that in one year I might just be fully competent, in the meantime I'll have to just wing it. Moving to France was a really great idea, it's a lot of fun, and apparently Mom and Dad have sent us BW3's wing sauce and root beer extract so really we'll want for nothing (at least in a food capacity).
Well I guess I'll take off, not a lot of deep thoughts today, oh well, that's usually a good sign for a Saturday.
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