And our own elders, may God have mercy upon them, used to say, "The study of mathematics is for the mind like soap for the clothes, which washes away from them dirt and cleans the spots and stains."
-- Ibn Khaldun
My thesis research involves rearranging Krylov subspace methods, such as GMRES and conjugate gradient iteration, in order to avoid communication in the parallel and out-of-core regimes. This involves tradeoffs between latency, bandwidth, redundant computation, and numerical accuracy.
In general, I'm interested in numerical linear algebra, performance tuning, programming languages (especially parallel and embedded languages), and software engineering issues for scientific computing -- especially when it involves using ideas from higher-level programming languages. I have background in the numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations, as well as numerical optimization.
This fall (2007), I'll be assisting with a new course for undergraduates on parallel programming, which is listed in the UC Berkeley schedule under CS 194. The instructor will be Prof. Kathy Yelick, who is my co-advisor. Prof. Yelick usually teaches CS 267, a parallel programming course for a mix of graduate students from computer science and other engineering and science departments. In CS 194, we plan to include applications that are more relevant for typical CS undergraduates, and also focus more on the shared-memory regime, which the new interest in multicore processors is making commercially important even for consumer applications.
I've also tutored and graded for various math courses, including a business linear algebra and optimization class at the University of Illinois.
I like to sing Gregorian chant and other ancient liturgical music in my (not so copious) spare time. I've had the privilege of singing in some lovely scholae (chant choirs) in the East Bay and North Bay. You can learn more about my chant work, get performance schedules, and listen to samples at my chant home page. I'm also a fan of poetry, in German and English, though not crazy enough to try writing it!
My parents emigrated to the US from northwestern Germany in the 1950's. My father's ancestors had been farmers for all of recorded history, and he found plenty of good soil in the Midwest to continue his trade. They settled in western Illinois near the Mississippi River and raised corn (that's maize, for those speaking BBC Standard), soybeans, and beef cattle. I grew up on the family farm, but found my calling in mathematics and computers (both of which are decidedly indoor activities). In 2002, I graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in math and computer science and a minor in German. I spent the next academic year taking math courses and meeting all kinds of interesting folks while on a Fulbright grant at the Technische Universität Berlin. Then, in fall 2003, I joined the UC Berkeley PhD program in computer science. At Berkeley, I had the good fortune to meet my lovely wife Mingjie while staying at International House.