Joe Fields

Using Manim

The Giant Icosahedron

Open Educational Resources

• GIAM

  Version 3.2 of my textbook, A Gentle Introduction to the Art of Mathematics.

• TFLabs

  Intended for first-year students, TFLabs is a textbook and a collection of laboratories to introduce students to technological tools that are of use to Math and Science majors.

• MWAU

  Mathematics in the World Around Us is an OER textbook intended for a "general education" math course for Liberal Arts students.

Office:

EN D118 (Engleman Hall, D-wing)

Phone:

392-6519

I am a professor in the  Mathematics Department  at Southern Connecticut State University.

I am a former chairperson of the Northeastern Section of the MAA.

Braxton Carrigan and I are running a Math Circle for high school students (and teachers). We call it the STEAM-powered Math Circle because we infuse activities from STEM and the Arts.

I am the lead developer/maintainer of the Guava package for the GAP computer algebra system. GAP is designed as a computational aid for Group Theory and Algebra, it has many add-on packages, among them is Guava which performs computations related to error-correcting codes.

I received my PhD degree in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
My areas of research are in the theory of error-correcting codes, and Combinatorics.
My advisor was Vera Pless.

Here are some items on which I've been working:

• A presentation on my solar pizza oven that I gave at Choate.
• A presentation on squigonometry at the Fall GeoGebra conference at SCSU.
• I am no longer the coordinator, but am still deeply interested in the NESMAA Collegiate Math Competition.
• A calendar for 2026 printed on plaits that can be woven together to form a rhombic dodecahedron
• We invited Mathematician/Sculptor George Hart to campus on 10/26/2012. George gave a lecture in the PAcE Seminar and then conducted a workshop with Southern's Math Club where they constructed one of George's sculptural designs: Cardboard Conglobulation.
• My presentation for CAMPY on cryptography.
• A truss with fractional dimension.
• Using honeydew melons to teach the volume element in spherical coordinates. (Students repeat the mantra "Rho-squared, sine phi, dee rho dee theta dee phi" while munching on the delicious volume elements.)
• Along with Ross Gingrich I am coaching the SCSU Putnam Competition team.
• The slides for my talk at the fall 2009 NES/MAA meeting -- Differential Equations with a Fractal Character.
• The slides for my expository talk on Coding theory.
• The slides for my expository talk on Brun's Sieve -- a nice generalization of the sieve of Eratosthenes that solves some notable number theoretic problems.
• The split weight enumerator of the Golay code, partitioned with respect to the supports of two disjoint minimum weight vectors, as a VRML model. (This version is non-rotating.)
• Version 4.2 of HTMX (a tool that helps you include equations in web documents) is ready.
• I am converting an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) car to a Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV). Find out more at the EV discussion list.
• A page using VRML models to show that the group of symmetries of the dodecahedron is A₅.
• I've created a Geography study site consisting of a bunch of blank maps of the countries of the world. These are image maps with links to labelled maps and flags (courtesy of the CIA's World Factbook) for the countries.
• My presentation at the 16th annual CSU Academic Computing Conference.
• I'm the Puzzle Editor for SCSU's Math Department Alumni Newsletter.
• DRAFT of "Decoding the Golay code by hand", an on-line math paper.
• Boy's Surface
• A Small Puzzle
• Animations!!!
• A dictionary of combinatorics.
• My Cat-tree/sculpture hobby.
• My hotlist.