In Remembrance of Scott Howell

In remembrance.

“John was an inspiring teacher and experimentalist. His educational passion was creating hands-on experiments built from ordinary parts you can find at any hardware store, what he lovingly called ‘mulch,’” said MIT senior lecturer in physics, and former King student, Peter Dourmashkin ’76 (physics), ’78 (math), PhD ’84. “He was MITx before MITx.” King was born in London and educated in France, ...

Sequencings and Howell Designs

Remembrance of Things Past

an unassuming entrance where once passed Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers, and the thousands of men and women who labored in secrecy. Collectively, they changed the outcome of World War II; individually, the contributions of a few laid the foundations of computing. Until recently, a strong possibility existed that Bletchley Park would be lost to modern development. Thanks to the efforts started by To...

Remembrance of futures past.

Much behavioural and physiological evidence suggests that the hippocampus encodes space. Puzzlingly, however, hippocampal damage also disrupts episodic memory. A recent study shows how these two faculties might be related, finding that the spatial firing of hippocampal 'place cells' is sometimes modulated by what the animal has recently done or what it will do next. Thus, the cells encode somet...

Howell Designs with Sub-designs

A Howell design of side s and order 2n, or more briefly an H(s, 2n), is an s x s array in which each cell is either empty or contains an unordered pair of elements from some (2n)-set V such that (1) every element of V occurs in precisely one cell of each row and each column, and (2) every unordered pair of elements from V is in at most one cell of the array. It follows immediately from the defi...