last edit: 2023-01-03
• In 2022 I attended two in-person conferences of historians of mathematics in Germany and Austria, the first life meetings after the two year break due to the COVID pandemic, where I also gave talks:
  • Slide rules in west-german schools after WW2, in particular ARISTO school slide rules
    Joint conference of the history of mathematics special interest group of the DMV, the German Association of Mathematicians, and the corresponding group of the GDM, the Association for the Didactics of Mathematics, Hildesheim, May 25-28, 2022.

    My presentation was in German, no proceedings. More below, see IM2022.

  • Robert Nelting, his life and his slide rules
    XV. Austrian Symposium on the History of Mathematics, Miesenbach, June 12-18, 2022.

    see my list of publications

    This article will later be augmented by more technical details previously researched by me and Günter Kugel, probably in the Journal of the Oughtred Society (JOS).

• I still have to finish the proceedings of IM2021 after these two conferences.
  This is planned for the near future.
• I gave two presentations as IM2022, the International Meeting of Collectors and Researchers of Slide Rules and other Mathematical Instruments, held online, September 17-18, 2022.
  • Aristo School Slide Rules
    extended English version of the presentation in Hildesheim

  • The Wind Rises — an animation film featuring slide rules

  Instead of a proceedings volume the written record of this conference will be published as a set of articles in JOS, the Journal of the Oughtred Society .
• March 15-19, 2023: Naunhof near Leipzig: Follow-up of the Hildesheim joint conference mentioned above, where I plan give a talk on
  • Mathematical Papers

  about all kinds of preprinted paper for drawing graphs in various types of coordiante systems, like squares papers, logarithmic papers, probability papers, papers using polar coordinates, etc, etc, and their history.

you see, I have a lot to do in my retirement ...

two low priority projects, on which I will probably / hopefully work sometime in 2023
• Programs for the ZUSE Z3

  Much has been written about the ZUSE Z3, the first operational freely programmable automatic computer (1941!), but there is next to nothing on software for this machine. I have written a number of sketches of programs and made a preliminary design for a cross-assembler as an aid to produce input tapes, in particular the Z3r replica built by Horst Zuse, the son of Konrad Zuse. My goal is to produce a nice set of demonstration programs and to show how the limited facilities of this proof-of-concept machine can be used for actual work.

• Algorithm engineering and paper on some related issues in programming style and program development methods.

  I recently found back a copy of the inital version of a paper written by me in 1984 in my archives. This memo was my initial reaction to an article in a well respected journal about an algorithm for binary tree handling, in my view deficient both algorithmically and in style. I created a smaller, cleaner and more efficient algorithm to the task with minimal working storage needed and a linear runtime, and implemented it both in Ada and C. I also wrote a lengthy article about it, explaining both the algorithm and general problems and approaches in program construction for and with abstract data types and their extensions. The editor of another journal quickly accepted my paper, but only the algorithm part, not the part about programming methodology and actual implementation, and asked for an extensive rewrite to this effect. However, at that time I had high pressure from my project at work and at the same time I privately needed all the time I could get for a serious love affair 😀. So the paper was never published, and in the end all the files were lost. All what remained was the printout of the very first memo which I recently found in my archives. I am not aware of any independently developed and published version of my solution to the problem.

  I have to recreate the solution and write a new article / report. It's low priority, but I really want it, both the algorithm and the program development aspects. So it will be a project for some future time, when I need to do something different from slide rules, math history and the like...