A website of


Matt Adelman

Computer Scientist, Mathematician, Photographer.


Computer Science

All of the implementations mentioned here and more can be found on my GitHub. I've worked on a few projects, for university, personal use, and freelanced for other parties. While in college I took an interest in functional languages, specifically SML. I took an individual tutorial to explore the work of Chris Okasaki in his book Purely Functional Data Structures. One of the more interesting implementations was Binary Random Access Lists. Since there are no references in a functional setting, we use lists of Leaf complete binary trees with special properties to give us guaranteed logarithmic access and updating to any item in the list.

Recently, I've been working on a few side projects using the Ruby on Rails framework. My first Rails project can be found here. It is called "Conception Connection, and is based off of SMBC 2922, one of my favorite web comics. This served as a chance for me to get to knows Rails a little bit, as well as an excuse to learn a little bit about web scraping. Since then, I also did a big project for the Wesleyan Costume Shop. This involved more database work, and mailers. In addition, I created a contract manager for the restaurant I managed while in college. These projects are not linked to, because they are private. In addition, I have designed a few static pages for people using Bootstrap.

My biggest project in University was was an implementation of RSA and a revisit of the Lenstra et al. paper Ron was wrong, Whit is right . This was a group project and our implementation can be found here. The main idea was that we tried to get as many of the certifications from the top 1,000,000 websites as we could, and then do an analysis using the Euclidean lgorithm to attempt to find pairs of bad moduli. Our method and results can all be found on my GitHub.

Again while in college, I developed an interest for experimental algorithmics and code tuning. I worked on a project to find the value at which it is better to use insertion sort than quick sort. Little things like this, which when used correctly make a vast improvement to the overall performance of a well known algorithm, fascinate me. I love working on interesting problems and the occasional hacking together a script to make something easier for me.

Mathematics

Graphics created with Mathematica and GnuPlot respectively.

Some of my favorite topics in math are Number Theory, Real Analysis and Algebraic Geometry. In my opinion, number theory has the most immediate and apparent real world applications. Specifically, most of modern cryptography has its roots in number theory. However, my real interest lies in the prime numbers. I am endlessly fascinated by the primes both because of their duality in both being so heavily studied, and yet, we know almost nothing about how they occur. It's the features like this that really drew me into this branch of math and got me hooked. For real analysis, I must say I really like the fundamentals. Starting off with basically nothing, it gives you the technology to say so much about the real numbers, and real valued functions. The completeness axioms are some of my favorites.

This just leaves us with algebraic geometry. Now I did take Abstract Algebra, but it didn't really capture my attention. However I must be a visual person, because this class was fantastic. Theorems like Hilbert's Nullstellensatz, and using affine varietes to prove the fundamental theorem of algebra is what really caught me. My final project for that class was a group project where we discussed the resolution of singularities, including blow-ups and Hironaka's method. In addition to these courses I have also taken Differential Equations, Discrete Math and Graduate Algebra as electives. I plan to take Mathematical Logic in the Spring. Both of the above graphics come from my Multivariable Calculus class.

Photography

I have had the great fortune of being able to visit many countries around the world, and it was on these trips, that I developed my love for nature photography. There is a certain thrill that comes with it. You can't simply tell the animal how to stand, or hope the sun will be just right for a shot of a landscape. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. The photos link to the sets they originated from in my Flickr account. If you want to view the whole photostream, just click here.