Stephen Becker's Homepage

I am a graduate student in the Applied & Computational Math department at Caltech, working under Professor Emmanuel Candes. My office is 214-50 (Firestone) [note: I switched offices Sept. '06], and my mail-code is 217-50. My office phone is x4545 (i.e. 626-395-4545) and email is srbecker [at] caltech [dot] edu. Here are several maps of the Caltech campus for visitors.

Academic related

• Research interests and info on the SHC Cluster at CACR; here's an introductory SHC guide I wrote in August '08.
• Current teaching position (Fall '08/'09)

  Instructor for ACM 11, Intro Matlab and Mathematica. I will be teaching the Matlab half, and TA'ing the Mathematica half (during which Alex Gittens will be teaching). Course page not yet available.

• Recent TA positions:
  • ACM 105 Applied Real and Functional Analysis. Office hours: Thur, 4-5 PM. My office is 214 Firestone. Spring '07/'08.
  • ACM 104 Linear Algebra in winter '07/'08
  • ACM 11 Intro to Matlab and Mathematica. ACM 11 website, a brief list of practical tips I quickly wrote up to get you up and running with the software, and various tips and tricks from others are collected here, including writing fast matlab code (pdf); see also accelerating matlab.
  • ACM 95/100 c in spring '07, recitation section #3. Here's the ACM 95/100 "underground"
  • ACM 104 Linear Algebra in winter '06/'07
  • ACM 105 Functional Analysis in fall '06.
• Spent summer 2007 working as intern for abInventio.
• today's CS papers on arxiv, as well as today's statistical papers
• "Fractional Stokes-Einstein and Debye-Stokes-Einstein Relations in a Network-Forming Liquid" is published Aug. 4th, 2006, in Physical Review Letters, Vol. 97 no. 5. article available here (in PDF), abstract available here.
• CV as of May '07 (in PDF) [this is currently offline since I am not looking for a job; email me for access]
• A short PDF of some various trig identities because I can never remember them
• Miscellaneous online math resources
  • Alex Stef's list of online textbooks in mathematics A very nice resource; there are several hundred books. Note that some online versions are not licensed for printing. If they are, you might want to print them two or four pages per sheet; here are multiple paged printing hints for printing from a unix or linux system (note: these hints are for the most part deprecated, since acrobat for linux now provides its own multiple page printing menu).
  • Direct links to Convex Optimization (Boyd, Vandenberghe) and Info Theory... (MacKay). Shannon's Original Info Theory paper. L.C. Evans' intro to stochastic diff. eq. S. Mauch's Abridged Applied Math textbook (requires caltech IP). J. Marsden's online PDF about Differential Forms and Stokes' Thm and draft of Manifolds, Tensors, Analysis and Applications (requires caltech IP). Yousef Saad's Iterative methods for sparse linear systems (1st edition only). Several old versions of Numerical Recipes.
  • The classic Abramowitz and Stegun handbook of Mathematical Functions, and the not-yet-complete successor from NIST, the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions, which only has online material on the Gamma Function so far.
  • Handbook of Applied Cryptography

Computer Related

• The MindTerm SSH java applet runs a secure-shell session via a java applet, but no X-Windows. If you want X-Windows on a PC, you can try TunnelMate (trial only), or xterm32 (also costs $, but Caltech has a license and hosts a copy of version 8.1; version 8.2 allows ssh key forwarding, e.g. with Pageant) [update: Caltech now has version 9.x available on their software server]. Another good suggestion, though I haven't used it myself, is Xming, which is a free X Windows server for Microsoft Windows (XP, 2003, Vista).
• WebVPN simulates a VPN without additional software (of course, it must be setup by your server; the link above is for the main caltech IMSS server).
• Here's a short script to backup a mail folder, intended for users of the Caltech ACM system: mailBackupScript.txt (written in bash)

Personal

• ASCIT movie library -- list of titles
• My photoalbums created with JAlbum, 2006 to present. I try to keep this current.
• My small climbing page, and a comprehensive list of the mountains I've climbed since 2000.
• Old picture galleries from my climbing page, updated last in Dec. 2005
• New item: a collection of articles from America's Finest News Source, describing various major aspects of my past:
  • What I learned from college at Wesleyan: radical-environmentalism, a detached air of superiority, not to work too hard, and not to set my goals too high.
  • What I learned from grad school at Caltech: how to split the bill at a restaurant, how to ask for money for things, that science is really hard, but astronomy is not always a hard science, time is apt to wrinkling, and that science can hurt relationships.
  • What I learned from growing up in Boulder, CO: be careful of synonyms, things get weird around 2 AM in a college town, working in a snowboard shop in Boulder is the default option for many, the Hippie Herds are swelling in number, and hippies really annoy their pets.
• Latest website endorsement: The Pain comics. A new one comes out every week, but they have archives back to 2000. And an ever newer addition, not for the faint-of-heart: Perry Bible Fellowship. Also, the classic grad student strip, Piled Higher and Deeper, based off of life at Stanford; and my high school favorite, Where the Buffalo Roam, based off of life at CU, although it's becoming a bit dated. And even though XKCD is uber-trendy at Caltech, I can't resist two links to specific XKCD strips: the James Bond and Raptor Exams, although this raptor one is also pretty good.
• I'm lending my math skillz to help out with the hunt for pterosaurs. However, I'm unhappy that we've given up on the hunt for velociraptors, since they're so much cooler.
• I'm involved with GSC flag football, playing for the "Playmakers". It's fantastic. I finally learned what a corner-back does, and I get to run routes against students I TA for.
• I'm involved with the Caltech Alpine club. I spend the club's money, mess with the website, and try to make sure that no undergraduates die.

Online LaTeX rendering

Thanks to the Mathtex server at Forkosh's MathTeX website, you can instantly render simple LaTeX expressions below. This is useful for quick-and-dirty conversion of, say, LaTeX that your TA sent you in an email ;-) . I'm actually using the server at problem-solving.be now, but the HTML for this form was taken from the forkosh site.

See also my dedicated LaTeX page that does the same, but with bigger text boxes and none of my annoying personal webpage stuff. BTW, some credit is due to Alex Gittens for bringing MathTeX (and mimeTeX) to my attention.

My email at caltech:
  (srbecker  at  acm.caltech.edu)
Old email addresses:
  (srbecker  at  caltech.edu) and
  (srbecker  at  wesleyan.edu)
  will also be forwarded to me. Both are still valid (the wesleyan.edu email is valid forever).
Other:
  (stephen.beckr  at  gmail.com) for non-work communications

[change the "at" to the @ symbol]