Today's podcast: Computational Origami
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit - Seneca
Today's podcast: Computational Origami
Categories: Mathematics, Technology, Art, Entertainment, Popular culture, Applied sciences, Information science, 113 wordsSend feedback •Robert Lang
Origami Artist and Theorist
The last decade of the twentieth century saw a revolution in the development and application of mathematical techniques to origami. Robert J. Lang describes how geometric concepts have led to the computer solution of a broad class of origami folding challenges and, as a consequence, enabled origami designs of astonishing complexity and realism to be developed.
As often happens in mathematics, a theory originally developed for its own aesthetic value has led to some surprising practical applications. In addition, it has shed light on long-standing mathematical questions and solved practical engineering problems. Lang gives examples of how origami has enabled safer airbags, Brobdingnagian space telescopes, and more.
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Today's podcast: JBoss (Marc Fleury)
Categories: Computing, Mathematics, Education, Physics, Internet, 326 wordsSend feedback •The story of JBoss mirrors some of the hottest trends in IT today. The company's open-source implementation of the J2EE standard now carries enough weight to influence J2EE3 and beyond, and its innovation in aspect-oriented programming is reverberating around the entire application development world. In this conversation recorded at JavaOne, JBoss Founder, Chairman and CEO Marc Fleury speaks with guest producer Scott Mace about the state of professional open source, Java and EJB3, Eclipse, .Net, Mono, application development for rich Internet clients, Red Hat's success and detractors, Sun's detente with Microsoft, and why trained physicists such as himself make good Internet application innovators.
Born in Paris in 1968, Marc Fleury got his Ph.D in physics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. He started in Sales at Sun Microsystems France and then moved to the US where he worked on early Java enablement of SAP at SAPLabs. Marc started the JBoss project in 1999. An ex-lieutenant in the paratroopers, Marc holds a degree in Mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique, a master in Theoretical Physics from the Ecole Normale ULM and was a visiting scientist at MIT during his thesis. Marc's research interest focuses on aspect oriented middleware.
If someone knows about middleware and server-side Java in general, that's Mark Fleury. In this podcast he makes very interesting aseverations about what was the state -and the future- of Java as of the middle of 2004. And what he says is valid today, though his words should now be analyised over again, under the light of the new scripting-for-web-applications phenomena: Ruby on Rails.
He tells the truth: the only way for Sun to get some credit when speaking about open-sourcing Java is by means of open-sourcing the JVM. And he tells the truth when he says that the middleware layer of Microsoft, even when they have very good -mainly architectural- ideas to copy from, is very weak as of now in the implementation. Specially when it comes to persistency.
