Stephen Becker's Homepage
I am a graduate student in the Applied & Computational Math department at Caltech, working under Professor Emmanuel Candès. 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
- June 2009: I just started using Mendeley to organize my PDFs. So far, it's exactly what I had been looking for and I highly recommend it.
- NESTA: a fast and
accurate first-order method for sparse recovery by S. Becker, J. Bobin and E.J. Candès
is submitted for publication, April 21 2009
- svt.caltech.edu is a software package for Singular Value Thresholding, for Matrix Completion problems. Please email me if you have questions about the software (and include information on the verson of Matlab, the operating system, and the hardware -- e.g. 32-bit or 64-bit). I am working on making it more compatible with 64-bit systems and compatible with complex-valued data.
- 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)
none, winter/spring '09
- Recent TA and instructor positions:
- Spent summer 2007 working as intern for abInventio.
- "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 Jan '09 (and in PDF as well)
- A short PDF of some various trig identities because I can never remember them
- Miscellaneous online math resources
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; version 8.2 and later allow 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
- 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.
The XKCD raptor exam was inspiration for this homework I wrote when instructing ACM11; the students hated the problem.
- 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 the students I teach (maybe that's why they let me catch the ball...).
- I'm the president of the Caltech Alpine club. I spend the club's money, mess with the website,
and try to make sure that no undergraduates die. We lead big winter mountaineering trips twice a year, and other people lead rock climbing trips several times per week.
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.
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... and click "Submit Expression" to see it rendered here
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(if the expression is long, some browsers might automatically shrink it;
in this case, click the image to expand it)
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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]
