[Edu-sig] upcoming presentation...

[kirby urner]

I'm shortly to give a 20 min talk, one of two, at our monthly Python
Users Group this evening.

Usually we meet at Urban Airship but today we've moved to a new
location, I think maybe just for this month but I'm not sure.

Michelle Rowley, PSF member, is our most visible / public leader and
she does an excellent job.

Steve Holden, former PSF chairman and still director, would likely be
there tonight but he's still out of town as is typical for him.

Gary Litvin if you're out there:  I just noticed one of our members at
this other meetup I attend (not the Python User Group) was a former
acting headmaster at Phillips, one Simeon Hyde.

You probably don't go back that far (he was in his 90s, I was reading
his biography).

The presentation features my Tractor Graphics / Art, which moves the
turtle (ala LOGO) to a plain ASCII 2x2 list of lists, a Farm class /
instance.

The idea is not to write advanced code or to replace turtle.py but to
sketch an accessible curriculum that alludes to much of the lore.
High bandwidth stuff.

Tractor subclasses create the Mandelbrot Set in one module, successive
generations in Conway's Life in another.   We also do the Wolfram
patterns.

These are all "Systems Science" topics (our Portland State U has a program).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirbyurner/5583591181/in/set-72157625646071793
 (by PSU faculty member, connects the dots)

I'll show some source code in PyCharm and my slides if all goes as
planned, ya never know.

On the Math Forum front I've been using Haskell more.

It's somewhat easy to figure out how far along I've gotten in the
famous tutorial:

http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters

Here's what Haskell looks like (not that different from Python in some
of its constructs, but not as imperative or dynamically typed of
course):

Module (baby.hs):

totatives :: (Integral n) => n -> [n]
totatives n
| n <= 0 = [ ]
| n > 1 = filter (\x -> (gcd n x) == 1) [1..n]

totient :: Integer -> Int
totient = length . totatives

Shell:

GHCi, version 7.4.1: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help
Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done.
Loading package base ... linking ... done.
Prelude> :l baby
[1 of 1] Compiling Main ( baby.hs, interpreted )
Ok, modules loaded: Main.
*Main> totatives 50
[1,3,7,9,11,13,17,19,21,23,27,29,31,33,37,39,41,43,47,49]
*Main> totient 50
20

More context:

http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7921700  (about half
way down -- not news to all of us I realize)

Kirby