Celebration of Mind Event – featuring Mike Keith

Friend Center Auditorium, Room 101
Princeton University
79 William St.
Princeton NJ

As in the past few years, we will be co-celebrating Martin Gardner’s 109th birthday by hosting a Celebration of Mind party as part of our meeting. Gardner (1914-2010) was the editor of the Mathematical Games column of Scientific American from 1956-1981. Plan to arrive at 7:30pm for refreshments and a special guest speaker, with the graphics video show starting around 8:15pm.

An Algorithmically-Constrained Short Film Made with Unreal Engine
Pre-meeting presentation: Thursday Oct. 19, 7:45 – 8:15pm EDT

The practice of “constrained writing” is well known, in which a text (perhaps quite long) is written so as to satisfy one or more self-imposed lexical rules, such as not using the letter E. This idea can be applied in other contexts as well. In this talk we will show and discuss a short film, made entirely with Epic Games’ 3D software Unreal Engine, that obeys a difficult and nerdy mathematical constraint. Mike Keith (MSEE, Stanford, 1978) is a software engineer who worked from 1980 to 2008 at the David Sarnoff Research Center, Intel, and a startup called Ambric, mostly in the field of devising, implementing, and optimizing video compression algorithms. His strong interests in recreational mathematics and word play led naturally to an obsession with constrained writing, especially using mathematical constraints. Mike has published many constrained works, ranging from short poems and stories to the book-length work “Not A Wake” (2010), which is still the longest text ever written using a certain constraint popularized in one of Martin Gardner’s Scientific American columns.

All Princeton ACM / IEEE-CS meetings are open to the public. Students and their parents are welcome. There is no admission charge, and refreshments are served.

More information on this event can be found on the Princeton ACM website: https://princetonacm.acm.org