James Rohal

I’ve recently become enamored with Google Calendar and have been using it to keep tabs of everything. When I start attending NC State next fall I will attempt to use MyPack as little as possible. By doing so I lose the ability to see the upcoming events on the public events calendar. The school publishes an RSS feed of the calendar but I really want to be able to access the calendar in Thunderbird and Google Calendar.

My searching led me to this page which gave some code for parsing an RSS feed into a compatible ICS file. After some heavy modifications I was able to set up an iCalendar file I could subscribe to. I used an online iCalendar validator to make sure everything worked when I finished.

Hope this might be useful to someone else until NC State decides to publish their own ICS file.

Update: For those interested in keeping track of the mathematics department at NC State, I used the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser to generate their calendar as an ICS file that you may subscribe to. It simply scrapes the data from the mathematics calendar.

To aide others in the application process for graduate school in mathematics I will provide elements of my application that might be of use.

Application Materials

Personal Statement: PDF, LaTeX

Results

1. University of Utah: Pending
2. University of Maryland at College Park: Pending
3. Florida State University: Pending
4. University of Iowa: Pending
5. Rice University: Pending
6. Cornell University: Pending
7. University of Texas at Austin: Pending
8. North Carolina State University: Pending

We settled on the topic of solving the nonlinear resource allocation problem which can be formally stated as
$$!\begin{array}{cll}
\min &{\displaystyle \sum_{i=1}^n f_i(\xi_{i})} &\\[0.5em]
{\rm s.t.} &{\displaystyle \sum_{i=1}^n g_i(\xi_i) \leq c}, & c \in \mathbb{R} \\[0.5em]
& \ell_{i} \leq \xi_{i} \leq u_{i}, & i = 1,2 ,\ldots, n
\end{array}$$

We will be applying several methods to solve this problem efficiently including interior point methods and a pegging algorithm.

I’ve begun meeting with my advisor Stephen Wright once a week. We are going to be looking at one of two possible topics:

1. Applying interior point methods to the resource allocation problem.
2. Tree-based decomposition methods in second-order-cone programming.

Oh, apparently the new trend is to refer to LP problems as LO problems.