Bryant Adams

"Building bridges between disciplines is an important aspect of the Liberal Arts, and the environment here at Wells makes that easy. Passing a colleague from another department in the hall, we strike up a conversation about using technology in the artistic process to augment visualization and realization, or places where mathematical strategies have a significant impact on political structures, or how complicated concepts in their field may be intuitively presented in the medium of a computer game, and the seeds of future collaborative courses are sown."

Professor Adams teaches courses in Computer Science and Mathematics and is particularly interested in cross-disciplinary topics. He introduced a computer game design and development course to the curriculum in 2008 and hopes to develop other courses with ties to art, ethics, politics, and education. His past research has looked at comparison and quantification of self-replication and at computational models suited to elucidating control flows in distributed networks. As a teacher, his goals include instilling an appreciation for the deep power of feedback and promoting a healthy skepticism concerning intuitively obvious conclusions.

Education

B.A. in Russian (culture) Studies, Washington and Lee University, 2001

B.S. in Physics and Mathematics, Washington and Lee University, 2001

M.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, Cornell University, 2006

Ph.D. in Mathematics, Cornell University, 2008

Select Publications

Zykov V., Mytilinaios E., Adams B., Lipson H., (2005). Self-reproducing machines. Nature, 435 (7038), 163-164.

Adams B., Lipson H., (2003). A universal framework for self-replication. European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL'03, September 2003, Dortmund Germany. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2801. 1-9.

Adams B., Smith S. A., Strichartz R., Teplyaev A., (2003). The spectrum of the Laplacian on the pentagasket. Trends in Mathematics: Fractals in Graz 2001, Birkhauser, pp. 1-24. MR 2091699

Courses Taught

Business and Management Software
HTML
Computer Programming I & II
Game Design, Development, and Implementation
Computer Organization and Assembly Language
Algorithm Design and Analysis
Programming Languages
Calculus I & II