talks

A compilation of talks and lectures given by Clark Brown related to mathematics and computing.

The material herein is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Soggetto Cavato: 15th Century Data Encoding

Neighbor Mind Garden Lecture Series, March 2023: Talk about the Soggetto Cavato (carved subject) method of embedding words into music from the 15th century. Included a live demonstration of the python project soggetto-cavato which embeds any string into a simple melody. (Slides)

The Halting Problem and Why We Can't Solve All Problems with Code

Neighbor Mind Garden Lecture Series, December 2022: An overview of the Halting Problem and the proof by contradiction that shows Turing machines cannot solve it. Explores the consequences and applications in computing. (Slides | Video)

Testing Ruby Code Using Grift for Mocking Methods

Neighbor Mind Garden Lecture Series, November 2021: A walkthrough of using the Ruby gem grift for mocking methods in the MiniTest testing framework for Ruby. This was given shortly after the initial release of grift. (Video)

Proof of Taylor's Law for Exponential Growth Models with Migration

BYU Student Research Conference, February 2021: Talk covering the application of the Perron-Frobenius Theorem regarding an exponential growth model with migration. Covers how that applies to our proof that Taylor's Law holds for the population samples from such a model. (Slides)

How Eigenface Facial Recognition Works

Neighbor Mind Garden Lecture Series, October 2020: Lightning talk about how eigenface facial recognition works. Explores the role of the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in the process. (Poster | Video)

Edit Distances

Neighbor Mind Garden Lecture Series, August 2020: Talk about edit distance algorithms and some of their use cases in software. Covers some of the common algorithms and the tradeoffs between different distances. (Slides | Video)

Modeling Taylor's Law with Exponential Growth and Migration

BYU Student Research Conference, February 2020: Talk about then ongoing research into Taylor's Law with a population model that includes exponential growth and migration between sub-populations. Covers Taylor's Law and our approach for proving it holds in a population model with migration. (Slides)