Robert Andrew Spencer

A blog of projects and random musings.

My PhD is in abstract algebra and though I have left academia, I still spend some time on my research. I've also thought a bit about presenting better proofs and wrote a satirical piece about public reactions to mathematics.

You can also read about my recurring fight with LaTeX.

I have been coding since my father wrote me a turtle interpreter when I was 7 and I've picked up some ideas since then.

You can find my opinions on inline type hints, static analysis, making your git logs better and more.

If you have need for a small, no-copy JSON parser, or an overpowered static website generator, then I have you covered.

Take a look at my github if you like. It isn't frequently updated but there are a fair few projects there.

Listen to the radio and podcast shorts that I presented and produced for the Naked Scientists, including the finding of the Endurance, relativistic atomic clocks, Gardens of Eden in the game of life and more...

These algebras are the prototypical diagram algebras, and the focus of my research. I've written on their representation theory mod $p$, certain important idempotents and their cell modules over mixed characteristic.

To assist with my research I computed many Jones-Wenzl and Jacobthal elements using some rust programs that I wrote.

When not thinking about Temperley-Lieb algebras, I've written a little on their higher dimensional analogues and other modular rep theory.

Also, here's a fun little number game.

Good ideas are hard to have, so I'm proud of some of my Bad Ideas, like that time I played golf with q, or when I imported a rust file in python. I've also done terrible things to browers.

Here you will find some small demos in webassembly like this 1D pacman, or this game of blackjack.

My first blogpost was a demo showing some randomly selected elements of $\mathfrak{S}_n$ in pretty circles.