Biography

Toby Driscoll is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware. His research interests are in scientific computation, mathematical software, and applications of mathematics in the life sciences. He is the head of the Center for Applications of Mathematics in Medicine at UD.

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Interests

High-order and spectral methods in scientific computing
Mathematical software in Matlab and Julia
Applied mathematics, especially in biomedicine

Education

PhD in Applied Mathematics, 1996

Cornell University
MS in Applied Mathematics, 1993

Cornell University
BS in Mathematics, 1991

Pennsylvania State University
BS in Physics, 1991

Pennsylvania State University

Recent Posts

The sorry state of teaching ODEs

I’ve spent the last two spring semesters teaching ODEs (ordinary differential equations) to a total of about 170 biomedical and chemical engineering majors. The content is dictated by a number of constraints: the perceived desires of the client departments, multiple instructors, all of whom have more experience with the course than I do, and traditional expectations. Based on a limited survey of popular textbooks ( this, this, and our choice, Brannan and Boyce), many courses like this are quite similar.

driscoll

Last updated on Jul 12, 2019 5 min read

Matlab vs. Julia vs. Python

I’ve used MATLAB for over 25 years. (And before that, I even used MATRIXx, a late, unlamented attempt at a spinoff, or maybe a ripoff.) It’s not the first language I learned to program in, but it’s the one that I came of age with mathematically. Knowing MATLAB has been very good to my career. However, it’s impossible to ignore the rise of Python in scientific computing. MathWorks must feel the same way: not only did they add the ability to call Python directly from within MATLAB, but they’ve adopted borrowed some of its language features, such as more aggressive broadcasting for operands of binary operators.

Jun 28, 2019 11 min read

New look, new tech

At long last, I’ve refreshed the look for this site. Previously it was based on a “Metro UI” style for HTML, which looked nice to me at the time. Actually it still looks pretty nice, but it was named for the Metro design introduced with Windows 8, which tells you that it wasn’t exactly a modern look. More importantly to me, I’ve ditched writing raw HTML for creating a site using the Hugo content creation system.

driscoll

Jun 27, 2019 4 min read

Jekyll for clicker questions

For a few years, I’ve been a fan of clickers (aka personal response systems) for large lecture sections. Clickers are a simple–and scalable–way to incorporate a little widespread active learning in the classroom. They can’t work miracles, but they do allow me to reward attendance, rouse the students once in a while, and give good feedback to all of us about how well the latest concepts are sinking in. I like the accountability: If you got the question wrong when 80% of the class got it right, that’s on you, but if 20% of the class got it right, that’s on me.

Feb 2, 2018 3 min read academia, computing, teaching

Trefethen & Bau & MATLAB & Julia: Iterative methods

I’m going to wrap up the long-paused MATLAB versus Julia comparison on Trefethen & Bau by chugging through all the lectures on iterative methods in one post. I’m back to using gists–not thrilled with any of the mechanisms for sharing this stuff. Lecture 32 (sparse matrices and simple iterations) Lecture 33 (Arnoldi iteration) Lecture 34 (Arnoldi eigenvalues) These are remarkable mainly in that they have such striking similarity in both languages.

Feb 3, 2017 3 min read math

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