¿Who Am I?

rocking halloween smiling pensive

I was born in London and grew up in Sydney, Australia and Rochester, Minnesota. I studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, math at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and computer science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. My math research was on the mathematics of music theory; the computer science work was on programming languages.

I have worked at Philips Media writing software for compilers, interpreters, and digital video, Cerwin-Vega! designing loudspeakers, E-mu Systems writing software for electronic keyboards, at the MAMA Foundation recording and producing jazz CDs, and at expertcity and Citrix writing network and system software.

I have taught physics at Muir and Marshall High Schools in Pasadena and Dos Pueblos High School in Santa Barbara, chemistry at San Marcos High School in Santa Barbara, math at Santa Barbara City College and Napa Valley College, and computer science at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

I am currently Director of Engineering at Shoonya Digital, combining my fascination with linguistics and programming.

You can send me mail at andrewzboard at gmail dot com. For prospective employers, here’s my résumé.



FAQ

What’s with the favicon? (I.e. the little icon favicon associated with this page, displayed on some browsers next to the URL.) Here is a magnified version of the icon, next to a Z-Board. See the similarity?

favicon       zboard


Mobile Apps

ana-grabr   An iPhone app that helps you create anagrams. You can walk your way down the “decision tree”, picking words or backing out if you hit a dead end. It’s free!

gear-grafr   Another iPhone app that plots gear ratios for bicycles. It costs (all of) $0.99.



Web Apps

These are Web pages that use JavaScript to perform animations and other interesting page effects.

Graph Clock   A 24-hour clock that is a little puzzle for you to figure out.

LL(1) Parsing   Generate a parse table and use it to construct a leftmost derivation.

Enumeration   Find permutations and combinations.

The Golden Ratio Pages   A series of pages exploring the famous ratio.

Chaos   Not a confused web page, but a discussion of chaos theory.

The 3D Pages   My JavaScript and Dart implementation of interactive 3D graphics.

The DSP Pages   Explaining the Fourier transform in the discrete domains.

Anagrammer   A tool for rearranging letters to make new words. There is also a mobile app for this.

Gear Ratios   A simple (I hope) explanation of bicycle gear ratios, what they mean and how to calculate them. Comes with a new JavaScript tool to graph these numbers for your bike. There is also a mobile app for this.

Regular Expressions   Sometimes a non-match can hang the system.



Publications

new!Modes Trailer   (2020) A brief teaser for a soon-to-be-released video discussing the Minor, Dorian, and Phrygian diatonic modes.

Numbers & Music   (2012) A lecture connecting graph theory with musical scales and chords.

Combinatorial Music Theory   (1991, JAES) More detail about scales, chords, and fingering patterns from the perspective of the physicist or mathematician.

Objective-C Pocket Reference   (2002, O’Reilly & Associates) A concise but complete description of the Objective-C programming language. Commonly known as the “Fox Book”.

Pitch-Shifting   (1988, JAES) Describes the complementary relation between shifting pitch and converting sample rates of digital signals.

The Analytic Impulse   (1988, JAES) Award-winning paper that examines the continuous and discrete Hilbert transform, its application to the Dirac delta function and to the design of loudspeakers.

The Z-Board   (1992, AES) Describes the Z-Board, a new kind of MIDI controller that expands, generalizes and abstracts the fingerboard interface of string instruments.

Objective-C: Dynamite!   An article about Objective-C, extolling the convenience of dynamic typing.



Other Stuff By Me

DSP   A three-letter acronym for Digital Signal Processing. Some much-used slides with little commentary.

TLA Overload   Are we running out of acronyms? Does PDA mean Personal Data Assistant or Public Display of Affection? Check this list.

Aspect Ratios   The only place you will ever find a comprehensible and comprehensive definition of the slippery term “aspect ratio”. Discusses resampling issues for digital video.

Time Codes   An explanation of what the hell drop frame means and how it is used.

MPEG-1 Pictorial Guide   A graphical guide to the ISO 11172 (MPEG-1) digital audio/video standard.

MPEG-2 Pictorial Guide   A graphical guide to the ISO 13818 (MPEG-2) digital audio/video standard.



Other Stuff

Here you will find links to other Web sites devoted to topics that interest me.

Sports

Nite Grooves   A groovy group of people who can’t stay at home on Wednesday nights.

UCSB Triathlon Team   The funnest group of people in Santa Barbara. (Yes, funnest is a word.)

Gear Ratios   A simple (I hope) explanation of bicycle gear ratios, what they mean and how to calculate them.

Motivation   A list of motivational sayings for athletes, from rec.sport.swimming.


Music

On Stage   Some photos from my musical history.

David Lindley   This LA-born mainlander plays reggae as well as the best of the Caribbeans. His album El Rayo-X (Spanish for “X-Ray”) is the single best album I’ve ever bought. Clean, clear, and upbeat. Sounds like a mango tastes.

Ry Cooder   The musician’s musician. Plays American roots blues and jazz. His drummer Jim Keltner is also one of the best.

Grateful Dead   They brought real polyphony to rock and roll. So many different styles...or was it just one big style?

String Cheese Incident   The “kids” (i.e. students) at UCSB turned me on to SCI.

J.S. Bach   Our Master. The Well Tempered Clavier is the Old Testament of keyboard music.

Ludwig van Beethoven   The Sonatas are the New Testament of keyboard music.


Literature

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman   My favorite work of historical writing. I wish it went on forever, like history itself. Follows the life of a single French nobleman in the 13th Century, but encompasses the entire age.

The Fourier Transform and its Applications by R. N. Bracewell   Sets a standard for technical writing. Saved my butt as an undergrad, and inspired me as a researcher.

Gödel, Echer, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter   One of the great books of the century. Primarily a discussion of Gödel’s Theorem about the limitations of mathematical systems, but seasoned by many other intellectual cultures.

Chaos and Fractals by Peitgen, Jürgens and Saupe   Clear simple explanations of the basic framework of chaos theory. A lot depends only on high-school math.

Programming Language Processors by David A. Watt   Shows how simple compiler design really is. This book got me started on the path that led to UCSB.

Nature, Man and Woman by Alan Watts   The only guy who makes sense when he writes about Zen. A true prose stylist too.

The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim   Shows how important real drama is in the stories we tell children.

The Nose by Nikolai Gogol   The best short story ever. The Macandrew translation is the funniest.

Tilings and Patterns by Grünbaum and Shephard   Great example of building an entire field of math from the ground up.

Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson   My childhood favorite. I still am Harold.

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino   Fantastic short stories, in all senses of the word.

William Shakespeare   Here you can look up phrases in a big Shakespeare database. “What is the city but the people?” [Coriolanus III.i] And what is Shakespeare but the words?


Miscellaneous

Urban Legends   Why do we believe what we believe? Sometimes stories propagate forever. Here are some of them.

new! Quotes   Some trenchant observations.



(The background pattern for this page was created with a program I wrote to examine tiling patterns first explored by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher. To get a closer look at it without all the autobiographical fluff, click here.)


several Mac made!