The Short Story

Mathematician by profession. Passionate about technology. Interested in puzzles. Born '82 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

E-mail

rkirov2.at.illinois.dot.edu

My Other Online Profiles

Twitter
Google Profiles
Facebook
Deviant Art
Project Euler

Academic Past

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Occidental College - Los Angeles,CA
American College of Sofia, Bulgaria

Present

I am currently all-but-dissertation graduate student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My thesis advisor is Prof. Iwan Duursma.

Algebraic Geometric Code Tables

I maintain the following site agtables.appspot.com, where you can find different parameters on algebraic geometric codes.

Publications

• An extension of the order bound for AG codes

Current Research Topics

• algebraic geometric codes
• secret sharing
• identifying codes

Fields of Interest

• coding theory
• algebraic geometry applications
• algebraic number theory
• combinatorics

I have a teaching assistantship at University of Illinois. In past I have graded and taught various courses (both standalone and recitation sections). Currently I work as the graduate student liaison for the computer-based teaching program Calculus&Mathematica(C&M). My job involves supervising the 8 C&M courses taught by graduate students and teaching one of them. The courses in the C&M program use the Mathematica software for a clearer visualization and a better conceptual understanding.

Courses Taught

• Linear Algebra (standalone,computer-based)
• Calculus 3 (standalone,computer-based)
• Calculus for Business (recitation section)
• Differential Equations (tutoring section)

Semesters on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent

4 (more information about the list)

Flash/ActionScript

One of my hobbies is to make small visual scripts/experiments that run in your browser. In the past, I used mostly with Adobe Flash/ActionScript. You can see some of them here:

• Puzzle game
• Fire Grass
• Floating Letters

JavaScipt/ProcessingJS

Since I recently discovered the open-source world, I came to realize that I don't appreciate the closed nature of Flash. Thanks to John Resig (the author of some great js tools like jquery), now I am trying to use Processing js. Hopefully, soon I will port all my toy flashes to processing js, and make some awesome new ones.

• Graph Editor (can be used with SAGE)
• Graph Editor LIVE (using a live spring model)

Mozilla Jetpack

Here is a small JetPack timer script I wrote (works only with Firefox Jetpack extension)

Google App Engine

Algebraic Geometric Coding Tables is website I developed to make big tables of results available on the web for other researchers. I uses heavily Google's app engine and jquery.

Droste Effect

The picture above is an example of a Droste effect. The spiralling was first done by Escher in one of his paintings . To understand the mathematics behind it this article in AMS is very useful. As it turns out these are "just"(remove parenthasis if you are a mathematician) holomorphic maps between elliptic curves over the complex numbers.

Code

To create the image, I have written a small program in processing(it's java with some extra libraries). You can use the program below to make your own pictures. The source code is sloppy at best, but it was more a proof of concept then fully developed application.

Droste Program for Windows (needs Java to run)
Source (use Processing to compile)

If you want to rewrite the code this article might help you, but seemed too engineering for my liking. There is already such a plug-in for GIMPS, which seems to have more functionality.