Alec Little

Alec Jacobson Teaching Statement

My passion for teaching began early. Throughout high school and college, I tutored English to African immigrants. Later, while student teaching remedial and gifted-and-talented mathematics at a New York City public middle school, I realized the diversity of how students learn. Some students thrive off interactive lectures, while others do not fully digest a lecture until working out examples at...

An assessment of Alec Rawls’s

I am unconvinced that the logical reasoning or the mathematical arguments put forth by Mr. Rawls have much merit. Perhaps he should heed his own advice: “The only real question is whether the assumptions that they rely on are correct” (p. 23). He seems to overlook geometric constraints placed on memorial designs that wish to focus on the line of the Flight 93 flight path (e.g., see p. 14). Many...

Alec Jacobson Research Statement Fabricating User Interfaces

I attack from both fronts: I bring ideas from differential geometry and finite-element analysis to model geometric problems more intuitively and more robustly. Meanwhile, I pursue user interfaces to reduce human effort and increase creative or scientific exploration of geometric data. To elaborate on these recurring themes, allow me to share four parallel and complementary branches of investiga...

Critical Thinking by Alec Fisher (Book Review)

The Eureka Moment: An Interview with Sir Alec Jeffreys

In 1984, while tracking the veins of globin gene evolution and panning the human genome for hypervariable linkage markers, Sir Alec Jeffreys accidentally struck gold—he discovered a way to identify any human being by a DNA ‘‘fingerprint’’. To use Jeffreys’ words, he has been ‘‘branded’’ by DNA fingerprinting, but he delights in its application and the hook it provides for public curiosity about...