In Spring of 2006 I graduated from Reed College and took a job as an intern at Perfectly Scientific, Inc. (PSI). I have since been promoted to the position of Chief Scientist at PSI. A few months ago I helped Aptech Systems implement several new features for their new version of GAUSS. More recently, I've been working with Skyler Technology to deliver some new features for their C3&trade database. During November and December of 2006, and the first week of January 2007, I worked with engineers from Critical Path Software and Focus Enhancements to develop a video demonstration for CES in Las Vegas. Focus Enhancements has a press release about CES here. This site contains my senior thesis, and information about some of my current and past, non-work-related, projects.
E-mail: goldena@reed.edu
(PGP public key)
Projects and sample code
Solid Koch snowflake (March, 2007)
This is just some Mathematica code to generate a solid analog of the Koch Snowflake by extending the usual two dimensional construction with triangles to a three dimensional construction with tetrahedra.
Checkers (October, 2006)
This is an English/American Checkers engine that uses minimax and alpha-beta pruning. The engine can be customized with precompiler directives. The back-end should compile without issues on most UNIX-like operating systems with the "make" utility. The game can be played from the terminal, but I've provided a front-end for Mac OS 10, and a GNUStep front-end as well.
Tick-tack-toe, and more (September, 2006)
This is an engine for "n in a row" games. It uses a brute force method to discover winning moves.
Ant simulation (March, 2005)
This is a remake of a classic ant simulation. Ants move randomly until they find a food source. On their way back to the nest, carrying food, they leave a trail that other ants follow.
Animated Newton basins (March, 2005)
This is a small program to create animations of morphing Newton basins by gradually modifying an underlying polynomial.
Ray tracing (March, 2005)
This is a little POV-Ray hack that uses recursive macros to ray trace a fractal tree.
Gravitation simulator (October, 2003)
This is a very old project of mine. It began as a way for me to play with the OpenGL API's, but quickly grew into a large project. I haven't maintained or updated it in years but some people are still linking to it so I'll leave it up for now.
Documents
Triangulations and circle packings on genus-1 tori (1.1 MB), C source code appendix (185 KB)
My senior thesis for Reed.
Introduction to subversion (5 KB)
A very brief introduction to version control with Subversion. I wrote this for the interns that I supervised when I first started at PSI. Perhaps someone else will find it useful as well. If there is any demand for it I might even finish the third section. In any event an extensive introduction to Subversion is available here.
Curriculum Vitae (230KB)
Links
Aptech Systems, Inc.
Aptech produces the GAUSS high level programming language and numerical analysis tool. I recently worked with them to deliver several new features for GAUSS 8.
Perfectly Scientific, Inc.
My current employer.
Tim Omernick's homepage
Tim has several interesting projects on his homepage. He likes to occasionally write freeware and example code for Mac OS 10, which he publishes on his site.
Ubuntu: Linux for human beings
Over the past few years I've experimented with several Linux distributions. By far my most satisfying overall experience has been with Ubuntu.