Exploring Scientific Wilderness

A letter of recommendation for Patrick Kreitzberg, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Montana.

A letter of recommendation for Kyle Lucke, a masters student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Montana.

A letter of recommendation for Jake Rooster Pennington, a masters student in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Montana.

Why does someone become a scientist? What would motivate a person to spend years to shave some time off of an algorithm? And what does this have to do with being a ``soul surfer''? A sincere thank you to our fellow soul surfers, Megan Louise and Johnny Jewel from the band Desire and the record label Italians Do It Better. You guys are great, and music is medicine. Listen to their catalog here.

What is a ``one way'' function? What does it have to do with ``guess and check'' from grade school math? And what's that got to do with cryptography and how it's attacked?

A chat with Mark Kayll, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Montana, about his career in science.

How do computer viruses spread themselves without access to their own source code? And what does this have to do with how human couples have kids? And what's that got to do with special programs called quines and Ouroboroses?

When is an infinite number of things still finite in size? And what does this have to do with flipping a coin until it comes up heads?

A chat with Johnathan Bardsley, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Montana, about his career in science.

Partitioning your Halloween candy into "clusters" of similar candy (e.g., chocolates together, hard candies together, etc.) is a difficult task. What does this have to do with finding duplicate songs and finding molecules with similar molecular structures? And how in the world could this be done without comparing every pair of candies to see how similar they are to one another?

Sometimes, searching a reduced state space makes things easier: finding the best Italian restaurant in town is a little easier than finding the best restaurant in town overall. But sometimes, this can make it more difficult. But what does this have to do with finding the most efficient order to visit several places?

A chat with Cory Palmer, Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Montana, about his career in science.

What does a bunch of pestering kids have to do with one of the most common attacks in modern cybersecurity? And how has this been used by nation states to attack on organizations with which the state disagrees?

What do a shell game and an old jazz song have to do with the design of programming languages? And what does that have to do with the tradeoff between the ability to implement complex data structures and the ability to implement high-performance code?

A chat with Douglas Brinkerhoff, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montana, about his career in science.

How can we make $7.63 in change using the fewest coins and notes possible? And what does this have to do with greedy algorithms and figuring out which elements could be in a chemical compound?

Hot dogs are sold in multiples of 8 and buns are sold in multiples of 10 (or was it 10 hot dogs and 8 buns?). How can we get the number of hot dogs and buns to align? And what does this have to do with number theory and the cryptography used to protect you online?

A chat with Travis Wheeler, Associate Professor of Computer Science, about his career in science.

How can rolling a ball downhill solve important multivariate problems? And what does it have to do with the core idea behind neural networks?

You've probably computed the area of a rectangle or a circle before. But how could you estimate the are of an irregular shape? And what does this have to do with throwing darts blindfolded?

You've probably gotten a spam email or two. So how do we detect if an email is spam? And what does that have to do with classifiers, machine learning, overfitting, CAPTCHAs, and the Turing test?

A chat with Alden Wright, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Montana about his career in science.

You're in a room with 99 other people-- what are the chances someone shares your birthday? And what are the chances that any pair of people share a birthday? And what does this have to do with cryptographic hashes and forging digital documents?

How can you figure out the identity of a baker by looking only at the cookies that they bake? And how can this be used to predict the weather or to do speech recognition?

A chat with Jesse Johnson, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montana about his career in science.

Should a barber shave himself? And what does that mean for making a program that defies anyone?

How many ways are there to count the votes in a tied election so that one candidate is never behind? And what does this have to do with combinatorics and walking home on a grid of city blocks?

How do we make computers faster every year? And what does it have to do with the rise of GPUs and the battle between 4 pigs and 4096 chickens?

A chat with Oliver Serang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montana about his career in science.

A diner has too many people dining alone, and so they can't seat a family of four. What does that have to do with why it's slow to copy a movie to your USB stick?

There's a lot of data online: people's blogs, emails, and social media posts. So how do companies mine that text for information? And what does it have to do with the word usage in Dracula and Frankenstein?

Imagine you have a coupon for free ice cream, but you have to spend exactly $17.25. How can you solve this and get your free ice cream? And what does it have to do with chemistry?

Cutting things in half is such an important idea, it shows up all over the place. So what does it have to do with cake, wine cellars, cootie testing, and the number of particles in the universe?

Welcome back!

The end of season 1-- leave any feedback on iTunes or on Google Play... or on Tigr!

We've already heard about turning sausages back into pigs... But how can we use the world around us (e.g., half a box of uncooked spaghetti noodles) to do all the work?

Someone offers you an envelope filled with cash... but there's chance that a second envelope has more $ in it. Do you switch?

You have a pile of bolts and a pile of hex nuts and they don't all fit together. How do you pair them up?

Fibonacci numbers come up in the strangest places. What do they have to do with breeding rabbits, converting between miles and kilometers, and how Google works?

Multiple testing failure is one of the biggest threats to scientific progress. But what does it have to do with online dating?

The word ``Bayesian'' is everywhere these days. But what does it mean? And what does it have to do with turning sausages back into pigs?

We all know that every good show starts with a pilot episode. So what exactly is ``scientific wilderness''? Well, the wilderness is all around you if you look closely...