Peterson Trethewey

Hello, I'm a fifth year math grad student at UCSB. To the right is a picture of me and of the Masterball puzzle, a permutation puzzle to which I devoted altogether too much thought when I was a senior at Berkeley. I am currently working with Professor Jon McCammond on a geometric group theory problem about 1-relator groups. On his webpage, you will find a picture of the convex hull of a thousand randomly selected points on a sphere. And that's all I have to say about that. The remainder of this page will be devoted to a myriad of mathematics and other nerdy things.
(self portrait)
(povray rendering)
Contact Info:
Office: 6432-P South Hall
Office Hours:
Math Lab Hours: n/a
E-Mail:peterson@math.ucsb.edu
Teaching: Math 8 (Summer '07)
Paper:
The Masterball Puzzle
Links:
Mathworld - This site is not the complete compendium of all math in existence, but it occasionally comes in handy.

Python - Python is one of the best all-around programming languages. You should really check it out.

The Wilhelm Scream - Here's something cool. A while ago, some avid Star Wars fans noticed that a certain scream sound effect occurs in each of the Star Wars movies. Pablo Hidalgo did some detective work and found that the character Wilhelm lets out this same scream in Charge at the Feather River (1953), and since then, the scream has made it into a whole host of other movies including each Indiana Jones movie, a few Disney movies, and Batman Returns. The movie Are We Done Yet? even featured a Wilhelm in one of its trailers. Here is a rather entertaining montage. The complete list of movies in which the scream appears can be found here.

The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia Construct a graph G where the vertices correspond to motion picture actors and actresses, and two vertices in G are said to be connected by an edge if there exists a movie which contains both of them. Define the Bacon number of an actor or actress V to be the length of the shortest path in G from V to the actor Kevin Bacon.