Present

I am currently a post-doctoral research fellow at Cryptography and Coding Theory Research Group at Nanyang Technological University. You can read more about my academic past in my academic CV.

Papers

The most current list of my papers can be found at the Arvix.

• "Minimum Distance Bounds for Algebraic Geometric Codes" published in JPAA, with Iwan Duursma and Seung-Kook Park.
• "Improved Two-Point Codes on Hermitian Curves" to appear in IEEE: TIT, with Iwan Duursma.

Slides from Talks

• Lower Bounds on Distances of Improved Two Point Codes - contributed talk for Finite Fields'09, Dublin, Ireland.

Algebraic Geometric Code Tables

I maintain the site agtables.appspot.com. There you will find parameters of algebraic geometric codes computed with different algorithms, developed by my advisor and me.

Teaching

I worked 2 years as the graduate student liaison for the computer-based teaching program Calculus&Mathematica(C&M). My job involved supervising all C&M courses taught by graduate students and teaching one of them.

Courses Taught

• Linear Algebra (standalone,computer-based)
• Calculus 3 (standalone,computer-based)
• Calculus for Business (recitation section)
• Differential Equations (tutoring section)

Semesters on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent

4 (more information about the list)

Academic Past

PhD - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
BA - Occidental College - Los Angeles, CA
High school - American College of Sofia, Bulgaria

When math gets to much, I like to unwind by coding. Being a big fan of open web technologies, means that my creations are one click away ... unless you are viewing this on IE.

Canvas Experiments

• Floating Text
• Red Grass

Google Maps

Google Maps API is great for making custom google maps. I used data from the American Mathematical Society to make a map of the PhD institutions along with their ranking.

• Mathematics PhD granting institutions in the USA
• Statistics PhD granting institutions in the USA

Dr. Mario JS Clone

I made Dr. Mario JavaScript Clone during one week at my girlfriends' home. Her family plays the original game with passion. Being the worst player, I focused on recreating the game and added a bot to play instead of me.

LightOut

Light out is a simple puzzle game. The real challenge to the gamer is to use linear algebra to generate all possible solutions and find the one with minimum number of clicks.

HexOut

Hex out is a hexagonal variation of light out.

I made an interactive graph library/editor using JavaScript and HTML5 canvas element (implemented in most modern browsers). That is graph as in graph theory. Subsequently it has been integrated as part of the computer algebra Sage. You can try it stand-alone or as part of Sage Online Notebook.

Droste Effect

The picture above is an example of a Droste effect. The spiralling was first done by Escher in one of his paintings. To understand the mathematics behind it this article in AMS is very useful. As it turns out these are "just" (remove parenthesis if you are a mathematician) holomorphic maps between elliptic curves over the complex numbers.

Code

My original implementation used processing, which is Java-based language for visualization. As of 03/10 I have rewritten the code in my currently favorite language Python, but it lacks a user interface.

Python Implementation
Processing Implementation compiled for Windows (needs Java to run)
Processing Source (use Processing to compile)

The code was inspired by this article. There is already a plug-in for GIMP, which has more functionality.

The Short Story

Mathematician by profession. Passionate about technology. Interested in puzzles.

E-mail

rkirov.at.gmail.dot.com

My Other Online Profiles

Twitter
Google Profiles
Facebook
Project Euler