Robert K. Moniot

Research Areas

Accelerator-based mass spectrometry measurement of long-lived radioisotopes, applied to archeology, geophysics and meteoritics.
Scale-space and equation-error minimization approaches to problems in image reconstruction and solution of partial differential equations.
Least-squares fitting data with experimental uncertainties in all coordinates.
1. Fit to a hyperplane having only one dependent coordinate and any number of independent coordinates. This work was done when I was a graduate student many years ago. It was never published except as a tech report. Here is that tech report in PDF format, HTML format, or the original LaTeX document.
  Download source code of an implementation of this method.
2. Fit to a hyperplane having any number of dependent coordinates and any number of independent coordinates. Applied Numerical Mathematics, 59, (2009), pp. 135-150. doi:10.1016/j.apnum.2008.01.001. An expanded version of that paper is available in PDF format here.
The Taxman Game is a mathematical amusement. I wrote an article about it aimed at math students, which appeared in Math Horizons, February 2007. This paper was awarded the 2008 Trevor Evans Prize of the Mathematical Association of America.
- Here is a somewhat expanded version of my paper, in PDF format.
- You can play the Taxman Game here.
- Norman Perlmutter, then a student at Grinnell College and now at City University of New York, has answered one of the open questions in the paper: a winning strategy for the game does exist, at least asymptotically (i.e., for pot sizes larger than some as-yet undetermined value). He has submitted a paper on this topic to the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal.
- After the Math Horizons paper appeared, I learned that the game was invented by Diane Resek of San Francisco State University. She writes: I came up with the game when I was working at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley from about 1969 to 1972. I was coordinating a grant Leon Henkin (UC Berkeley) and Robert Davis (I think he was at U of Illinois at that time) had from NSF to work with K-6 teachers in the Berkeley Unified School District. One of the things I tried to do was to come up with interesting ways for kids to practice their skills or their facts which would involve them in some thinking and not be so boring. The Taxman was one game I came up with for multiplication facts. It was named for the Beatle's song -"Taxman". At the same time other people were working with kids on teletype machines. They taught them Basic and had games on it for them to play. When I came up with a game or an activity, they would turn it into a program. (slightly edited).
I am the developer of the ftnchek program for debugging FORTRAN programs.

(Here is a link to an introductory text on FORTRAN 77 by Clive Page.)

I am also an amateur Galileo scholar. Here is a talk about Galileo that I presented as part of Fordham's College At 60 lecture series.