William F. Hammond

Information for My Students

My Current and Forthcoming Courses

Information for students currently in my courses and, as available, information on the courses that I am planning to teach.

Information for My Advisees (also available as PDF for printing)

My advisees should review this as the time for registration approaches.

GELLMU

Generalized Extensible LaTeX-Like MarkUp (GELLMU) is the name of my project that originated with the aim of building a bridge from traditional LaTeX to the new world of XML languages. From September 2, 2004 “regular” GELLMU provides automatic production of article-level documents from a single LaTeX-like source file to both (1) the modern form of HTML extended by MathML for optimal, fully accessible, online content and (2) Adobe's portable document format (PDF) for printing.

Overall GELLMU is a complex project with modular design. At the front end it offers the use of simple LaTeX-like markup, with a macro language taking arguments, to facilitate writing for most SGML document types including DocBook, HTML, TEI, and XHTML. (One must, of course, know enough of the vocabulary of one's document type to suit the needs of one's content.)

Mathematical Research Interests

Course Materials

Mathematics and the Network

Recent Presentations

Curriculum vita

A few pointers

I Will Derive

A math video at YouTube, more fun than serious, pitched for calculus students.

Jobs in Computer and Mathematical Sciences to Grow Fastest of All Professions

A forecast for 2008 from the MAA said to originate with the Bureau of Labor Statistics

SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software

the grand unification of computer algebra systems

Online Mathematics Textbooks

A list of 65 online texbooks prepared by Professor George Cain of Georgia Tech.

MoWGLI

A project devoted to mathematics on the web having the goal of moving from "machine-readable" mathematics to "machine-understandable" mathematics.

What Can We Do About Journal Prices?

An article by John Baez.

New Wiki Book on LaTeX

Recommended web browser with native support for MathML:

Firefox, version 2, available for most platforms.

Math Will Rock Your World

An article in Business Week, January, 2006.

About the high cost of commercial mathematics journals:

Donald Knuth's October 2003 letter

What Linux can do for you

An October 2003 PDF slide show from Oxford University by Lou Burnard and Sebastian Rahtz of Oxford University Computing Services.

Orwellian Software Patent Threat in Europe

Software patents are basically patents on abstract concepts. They pose a threat to academic freedom. Do not confuse software patents with software copyrights (which usually are legitimate). Check out the section entited Take Action at The GNU Project site. Are you sure that your latest theorem does not encroach upon a patent?

"Just as interchangeable parts drove the Industrial Age, reusable information powers the Information Age."

XML first became a recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium on February 10, 1998. Read the article XML at Age 5 by Dave Hollander and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen.

From Egyptian fractions and platonic solids to Dynkin diagrams and non-abelian Hodge theory

A brilliant presentation, dated June 20, 2002, for week 182 of John Baez's expository series of postings titled “This Week's Finds”: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week182.html

The Mozilla Web Browser

Mathematics became more fully available on the world wide web when Mozilla 1.0 was released on June 5, 2002 with native handling of Mathematical Markup Language in re-sizable, re-scalable, and accessible web pages. Versions for various platforms may be downloaded from the Mozilla Project. Also see the 1.0 FAQ

It is very important to the future of mathematics on the network that there is an open software development project similar to Linux based upon the March 31 1998 public release of the source code to the NetScape web browser. See the article Why Mozilla Matters

News about Mozilla is available at the Mozilla site and from MozillaZine. Information about Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) is available from the World Wide Web Consortium. The Albany math web has information about math on the web.)

Cool Math T-Shirt

An undergraduate research project at Harvard during the Spring of 2002 found that the “Somos-4 sequence”, a certain sequence of integers defined by a quadratic 4 step recursion that also arises from an examination of the arithmetic on an elliptic curve, counts the number of perfect matchings for the planar graphs in a newly constructed sequence of graphs.

The SGA Project Grothendieck's SGA is headed for arXiv.

Meanwhile graphic images of old pages are available from Harvard

The Modular Curve Theorem (née "The Modular Curve Conjecture")

An archive that I keep.

The Halloween Documents

The Halloween Documents are concerned with the perception of open source software projects such as Mozilla and Linux in commercial software houses.

Cygwin

Cygwin, originally from Cygnus Software, now part of Redhat, purveyor of "Redhat Linux", can give a Windows user an intermediate step toward broader functionality at no cost in that it provides X11 (with mouse-capable remote login to Linux hosts), gcc, bash, and most GNU tools under Windows, as well as a Windows facility for building old friends such as PARI/gp from source.

Math-Net links to the mathematical world (Berlin)

The Math-Net Links belong to the first steps of the "Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fuer Informationstechnik Berlin" (ZIB) towards a "Distributed Information System for Mathematics", a project planned by the "Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung" (DMV) for the years from 1996 to 1998.

One of the best posters seen in a while.

From the University's Theater Department, April, 1996.

The Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign

Dept of Mathematics and Statistics, The University at Albany

This leads to The New York Journal of Mathematics, information about the Department, and information about mathematics and statistics.

University at Albany World Wide Web (WWW) Service

The central entrance for the University at Albany