Robert Cunningham's Blog

Welcome! The point of this tutorial is to teach you how to use Mathematica for menial algebra and calculus. Fluency in Mathematica has encouraged me to think at a layer of abstraction above algebra, which has increased my enjoyment of courses with a tiresome amount of it. I hope it

The Stoics suggest that if you have something you really enjoy, you should give it up occasionally. This helps you to more fully appreciate having the thing. For example, if you have a warm winter coat, occasionally walking around without it will make you appreciate it more. This got me

MIT has an introductory programming subject called 6.009 ("six double-oh nine"). Its title is "Fundamentals of Programming," and it's a remarkable class. 6.009 is remarkable because it teaches people how to code. There's no theory to cram and flush. Lectures are effectively optional. But the problem sets are

I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.Each year on my birthday, I pull up time.is and quietly watch it tick from 11:59:59 to 12:00:00. This moment is quite emotional,

When I was in middle school, I spent a ton of time playing video games. One of the many I played was a mobile MMORPG. It was wholly unexceptional, but delightful in the way that all MMORPGs are: you fight stuff, level up, buy some items, fight more stuff, and

Last year, I named a project 'Cydr' (read 'cite-r'). I loved the name. It was clever, short, and had a sexy startup vibe to boot. It turned out to be a disaster of a name. You always had to spell it when chatting with people. And then, because the spelling

There's natural (almost foregone) conclusion that a university's acceptance rate is inversely proportional to its quality: low acceptance rate represents high quality, and vice versa. The other day, I realized that this metric is much more easily manipulated than I had previously thought. Here's an illuminating example. In a town

I need Linux for development work, and Windows for software like Photoshop (sorry, Gimp). VMs have high keyboard latency and power consumption, and passing through a GPU is annoying. Default dual booting makes me reopen everything when I switch OSes, and is routinely broken when Windows Update overwrites GRUB. After

Let's discuss a situation familiar to many high school students. You're taking a cutoff test like the AMC, and need at least 100 points to advance to the next round. 6 points are awarded for a correct multiple choice answer (options are A through E), 1.5 for a question