Algorithm Education in Python. Pai Chou, a faculty member in a different department here at UCI, clarifies why Python is such a good match for the pseudocode commonly used in algorithms classes. An old paper from 2002, but still quite valid, I think. (Via.)

For the last week my email has been a casualty of the daylight savings time change, so if I've been more than usually unresponsive, that's why. My regular email client wasn't working and I was stuck with a difficult to use webmail system as fallback. Today we finally tracked down the problem. Turns out to be a three-way incompatibility between the department's newly recompiled IMAP server (needed to deal with the time change), Thunderbird 2.0 beta (which I had been using), and SSL (so my password isn't transmitted in the clear). So I'm back to Thunderbird 1.5 and working again.

This mess did convince me to set up a new gmail address: david.eppstein@gmail.com. It's likely that I won't check it as regularly as my department mail address, but it could be useful in the future in case something won't get through my default spam filtering, and I'm leaving it as the default for my LJ notifications.

ETA: I'm very quickly remembering why I switched to the 2.0 beta in the first place. 1.5 has this nasty habit of getting into a state where none of the controls work, not even the quit command, I have to force-quit to get out of it, and I lose whatever email drafts I was working on... 2.0, despite being beta, was much more stable. I was also becoming quite fond of its new "move again" key-command.

Størmer's theorem is really not so much a theorem but an algorithm, for finding pairs of consecutive smooth numbers. I implemented Lehmer's improved algorithm, in Python, as I needed an implementation to generate some examples while expanding the WP article (and maybe more importantly, to check my understanding of Lehmer's paper). It includes some careful bignum implementation of rounding quadratic irrationals, finding continued fraction expansions of them, and solving Pell's equation, which might be useful for other purposes.

I doubt I'll be awake in time, but Karl Rubin will be speaking about Fermat's last theorem, tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at 7:30, at the Beckman Center.