This is the site for Scott Sievert, a graduate student at UW–Madison. I am a mathematician-in-training, think Python is pretty sweet 🐍 and love to ski 🎿!

# Blog

I tend to blog about technical topics, including interesting mathematics and cool applications of Python.
• Motivation for sexual reproduction
in reproduction information-theory

Of course, the purpose of sexual reproduction is to perpetuate our species by having offspring. Combined with natural selection, it’s enable fit our genes to our environment quickly. Buy why is it required to have two mates to produce a single offspring? Would asexual reproduction or having 3+ parents be more advantageous?

• Easy powerful parallel code execution and use on a UW cluster
in python numpy speed parallel

I often have highly optimized code that I want to run independently for different parameters. For example, I might want to see how reconstruction quality varies as I change two parameters. My code takes a moderate amount of time to run, maybe 1 minute. This isn’t huge, but if I want to average performance over 5 random runs for $20^2$ different input combinations, using a naïve for-loop means about 1.5 days. Using dask.distributed, I distribute these independent jobs across different machines and different cores for a significant speedup.

• NumPy GPU acceleration
in python numpy gpu speed parallel

I recently had to compute many inner products with a given matrix $\Ab$ for many different vectors $\xb_i$, or $\xb_i^T \Ab \xb_i$. Each vector $\xb_i$ represents a shoe from Zappos and there are 50k vectors $\xb_i \in \R^{1000}$. This is computation took place behind a user-facing web interface and during testing had a delay of 5 minutes. This is clearly unacceptable; how can we make it faster?1

1. Note: I link to the libraries I discovered in “Other GPU libraries” and show some speed results (both generated and from other sources)

• Probability of a powder day
in skiing powder probability

This last spring break, I had a ton of fun! Why?

I had the good fortune of catching a powder day with powder skis this spring break! While riding the Born Free chair at Vail, I wondered what the chances of this happening in a given trip1?

1. The source for this post is available on GitHub at stsievert/powder-day-probability