Benjamin Hackl

New talk at AofA22, and a note on typesetting math with reveal.js

I had the pleasure of presenting recent joint work with Alois Panholzer and Stephan Wagner on the analysis of a stochastic process involving iteratively uncovering the vertices and edges of labeled trees at AofA22.

Date: June 20, 2022
Tags: math, conference, AofA, revealjs
From rolling dice to differential equations: a discussion of four generating function problems

In this video blog post, I want to discuss the four exercises that 3blue1brown left at the end of his latest video, plus some additional background and context from the point of view of someone who works with generating functions a lot.

Date: June 3, 2022
Tags: math, 3blue1brown, generating functions
Manim on a Raspberry Pi

Due to one of the libraries that Manim depends on (skia-pathops) not specifically supporting the architecture of Raspberry Pi, trying to install manim might lead to an error that reads along the lines of this:

Date: May 10, 2022
Tags: Software, Manim, Raspberry
A Report from Uppsala

It’s time for an update! A lot of stuff has happened in the past few weeks, and I think my blog is a good space to keep track of it all (at least a bit 😅).

Date: June 10, 2021
Tags: Uppsala, Matura, Manim, MRC, Google Summer of Code, AofA
Goodbye, Summer interns of 2020!

For the past four weeks, my colleague Roswitha Rissner and I supervised five young mathematicians who joined our department as summer interns.

Date: August 7, 2020
Tags: math, videos, internship
Mathematician tackles Austrian school leaving exam: BHS edition

After a lot of positive feedback for my video regarding the school leaving exam, I decided to do the same thing for the school leaving exam in mathematics for a different Austrian school type (BHS).

Date: June 7, 2020
Tags: matura, stream, german
Mathematician tackles Austrian school leaving exam

As there was some controversy regarding the difficulty of the Austrian school leaving exam in mathematics, I got interested and wanted to check things out for myself.

Date: May 31, 2020
Tags: matura, stream, german
Technology for Online Teaching during Social Distancing

For some reason, my students this semester are happy with what I have done to move my classes to online formats (which, of course, was neccessary due to COVID-19). A friend asked me to write an article containing my views and recommendations for online teaching for a magazine, resulting in the text below. The article did not appear yet – but as soon as it does, I’ll update this blog entry with a link to it.

Date: April 29, 2020
Tags: online teaching, software, COVID-19
Workshops @ BRG Viktring: Von Büchern, Tauben und den Türmen von Hanoi

Es war mir eine große Freude, wieder einmal in meine alte Schule, dem Bundesrealgymnasium Klagenfurt-Viktring zurückzukehren um Mathematik-Workshops mit allen siebenten Klassen abzuhalten.

Date: October 12, 2018
Tags: math, workshop, school
Talk @ AofA18: Counting Ascents in Generalized Dyck Paths

Last week I participated at AofA18 in Uppsala, Sweden and gave a talk on Friday.

Date: July 2, 2018
Tags: math, talk, ascent, lattice path
Goodbye Wordpress, Hello Jekyll!

I am currently in the process of migrating my old Wordpress site to a collection of static pages, generated by Jekyll. I am migrating because of the following reasons:

Date: June 7, 2018
Tags: etc, infrastructure
Talk: Ascents in Non-Negative Lattice Paths

Today, in the last week of my four week research stay at Stellenbosch University, I gave a talk on a recent cooperation with Clemens Heuberger and Helmut Prodinger.

Date: February 14, 2018
Tags: math, talk, lattice paths
Seminar: Analysis of a Growth Process for Plane Trees

This week I am giving a two-part talk series in Mark Ward’s informal seminar on Analytic Combinatorics at Purdue University.

Date: July 7, 2017
Tags: math, talk, trees, growth
Schulvortrag @ BRG Viktring

Es war mir eine besondere Freude, heute in meiner ehemaligen Schule, dem BRG Viktring, einen Vortrag aus Mathematik vor den 7. Klassen halten zu dürfen.

Date: June 14, 2017
Tags: math, talk, school
Summer School: Techniques in Random Discrete Structures

I’m currently in Athens at the summer school “Techniques in Random Discrete Structures”, where I am responsible for the exercise sessions.

Date: May 24, 2017
Tags: math, summer school
Talk: On Reductions of Plane Trees

I’m currently visiting my mentor Helmut Prodinger at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and today I gave a talk in the local colloquium.

Date: April 7, 2017
Tags: math, talk, tree, reduction
Talk @ ANALCO17: Iterative Cutting and Pruning of Planar Trees

I gave a talk at the 2017 Meeting on Analytic Algorithmics and Combinatorics (ANALCO17).

Date: January 19, 2017
Tags: math, talk, tree, reduction
Mathematik-Seminar der Hans-Riegel-Stiftung

Today I held an invited workshop on combinatorics and the symbolic method at the Mathematical Institute of Bonn University (Bonn, Germany) for alumni who received a “Hans-Riegel-Fachpreis”.

Date: September 25, 2016
Tags: math, teaching
Talk @ AEC2016: On Reductions of Rooted Plane Trees

Today I gave a talk at AEC Summerschool 2016 at JKU’s Research Institute for Symbolic Computation (RISC) in Hagenberg, Austria.

Date: August 1, 2016
Tags: math, talk, tree, reduction
Talk @ AofA16: The Register Function and Reductions of Binary Trees and Lattice Paths

On July 8, I gave a contributed talk at this years 27th edition of the International Conference on Probabilistic, Combinatorial and Asymptotic Methods for the Analysis of Algorithms (AofA’16), which took place in Kraków, Poland.

Date: July 8, 2016
Tags: math, talk, register function, reduction
Talk: On a Reduction of Lattice Paths

Today I gave a talk at Stellenbosch University (South Africa) presenting my current research on a reduction procedure for two-dimensional lattice paths consisting of the four steps up, right, down, left.

Date: March 4, 2016
Tags: math, talk, reduction, lattice paths
Jupyterhub with SageMath Kernel

Recently I made some efforts to get a Jupyterhub instance with a SageMath kernel up and running on one of my servers — with success! 🙂 Actually, the installation is really not that difficult. Nevertheless, I want to write a few lines describing the troubles I ran into and my solutions.

Date: March 4, 2016
Tags: software, SageMath, jupyterhub
Google Summer of Code 2015: Conclusion

The “Google Summer of Code 2015” program has ended yesterday, on the 21. of August at 19.00 UTC. This blog entry shall provide a short wrap-up of our GSoC project.

Date: August 22, 2015
Tags: GSoC15, SageMath
Asymptotic Expressions: Current Developments

Since my last blog entry on the status of our implementation of Asymptotic Expressions in SageMath quite a lot of improvements have happened. Essentially, all the pieces required in order to have a basic working implementation of multivariate asymptotics are there. The remaining tasks within my Google Summer of Code project are:

Date: August 17, 2015
Tags: GSoC15, SageMath
Computing with Asymptotic Expressions

It has been quite some time since my last update on the progress of my Google Summer of Code project, which has two reasons.

Date: July 16, 2015
Tags: GSoC15, SageMath
House(s) of Cards

When I sat at our family dinner on Saturday, I watched my cousin build a house of cards from coasters. At one point he said to me: “I want to build a reeeally tall house of cards. One with like 100 levels! Do you think we could collect enough coasters from the tables around here?”. The question got me interested, and so I decided to do some counting.

Date: June 15, 2015
Tags: math, cards
Asymptotic Expressions: Motivation

So, as Google Summer of Code started on Monday, May 25th it is time to give a proper motivation for the project I have proposed. The working title of my project is (Multivariate) Asymptotic Expressions, and its overall goal is to bring asymptotic expressions to SageMath.

Date: May 29, 2015
Tags: GSoC15, SageMath
Algebraic Function Fields of Genus 0

In this post I want to discuss the exercises from our Algebraic Curves course I worked on (and struggled with) last week.

Date: May 24, 2015
Tags: algebraic curves
Google Summer of Code — Countdown

Today I received the welcome package for attending this year’s “Google Summer of Code”! Actually, it’s pretty cool; the following things were included:

Date: May 23, 2015
Tags: GSoC15