CV
Check it out here.
Consciousness research
I’ve joined the Integrated Information Theory group, led by Dr. Giulio Tononi, at the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
PyPhi
PyPhi is a Python library to calculate integrated information, the quantity that integrated information theory identifies with consciousness.
vPhi
vPhi is a web-based interface to PyPhi that allows nontechnical users to perform IIT calculations and visualize results.
PyEMD
PyEMD is a small Python wrapper, written in Cython, of an excellent C++ implementation of the Earth Mover’s Distance metric. I made it for use within PyPhi.
Applied mathematics research
Over the summer of 2012 I did some research in applied mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. My research partner and I made a poster summarizing the results and presented it at a couple of conferences.
Dotfiles
My dotfiles are on GitHub. There’s a lot of customization for Vim and the terminal prompt. Someday I’ll package them properly, but for now there’s a half-baked approximation:
git clone https://github.com/wmayner/dotfiles.git ~/dotfiles cd ~/dotfiles rake install
The rakefile is quite old, and doesn’t install any of the various dependencies. See the README for information on those.
rake install to backup your existing dotfiles.The Mandelbrot Set
In my senior year of high school I hacked together a Java applet that lets you explore the Mandelbrot Set, an incredibly fascinating and beautiful mathematical object.
I first came across it when I read Chaos by James Gleick in 10th grade. Right after that, I read Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach (like every other introspective nerd). This was my first glimpse of real mathematics. I had always thought I didn’t like math, but after seeing this I realized that I just didn’t like math class.
The Mandelbrot Set is the set of complex numbers \(c\) for which the orbit of \(0\) remains bounded under iteration of this beautifully simple equation:
\[ z_{n+1} = z^2_n + c \]
Check it out.