Decoding, Gerrymanders, and Markov Chains David Austin Grand Valley State University In 2009, crypto miner James Howells of southern Wales mistakenly threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins. That’s over $100 million even in today’s sinking crypto landscape. Thirteen years later, Howells has a plan, backed by venture capital,Read More →

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Meet me up in space! Rather than closing the distance, however, the target seemed to move down and away in defiance of everyday intuition... David Austin Grand Valley State University Complex space missions rely on the ability to bring two spacecraft together, a procedure called orbital rendezvous. A spacecraft dockingRead More →

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Pooling strategies for COVID-19 testing How could 10 tests yield accurate results for 100 patients? David Austin Grand Valley State University While the COVID-19 pandemic has brought tragedy and disruption, it has also provided a unique opportunity for mathematics to play an important and visible role in addressing a pressingRead More →

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Transmitting Data with Polar Codes This then is the significance of Arikan’s polar codes: they provide encodings for an important class of channels that enable us to transmit information at the greatest possible rate and with an arbitrarily small error rate. … David Austin Grand Valley State University Introduction WirelessRead More →

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David Austin’s Column Archive Here are David Austin’s older Feature Columns. David’s newest columns may be found here. March 2021 – Lost (and found) in space (Math and the Sciences, Math and Technology, Linear Algebra) October 2020 – Pooling strategies for COVID-19 testing (Math and the Sciences, Math and Nature,Read More →