Stuart Reges is a lecturer at the University of Washington who has written an excellent Java textbook, teaches really great courses and has played a large role in inspiring me to teach.  Stuart’s talk today touched on a number of intriguing topics he explored over the summer, some with direct ties to computer science and others with less obvious ones.  The goal was to give you an opportunity to come into contact with some fascinating, deep ideas you might not otherwise encounter.

Stuart started by showing us examples of fractals or infinitely repeating patterns.  He talked about how these are generated algorithmically, generally by writing a computer program, but that the same self-similarity pops up in parts of real life.  For example, dirt close up looks very similar to a canyon from far away.  Given this principle, animators tend to use fractal patterns to generate realistic looking landscapes. 

He then showed us some data that surprisingly enough exhibited fractal characteristics.  It turns out that when looking at county population data, about 30% of the populations start with a digit of 1, 17% with a digit of 2 and so on with decreasing frequencies.  That stays true if the populations are doubled!  That self-similarity can be described as fractal and the phenomenon relates to Benford’s Law.   Stuart was able to explore this phenomenon and confirm it by writing short computer programs to sift through the data.

We then learned about meta which is a concept many computer scientists are fascinated by.  We realized through some examples that our daily life includes an incredible amount of meta-information.  That’s a big part of why computers are so bad at acting human — they aren’t able to keep track of all the background information.

Finally, Stuart showed us a nifty algebraic card trick which he says convinced him to study math in college!

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