Weekly Schedule
Contact Information
Personal Background
Teaching
Research
Student Advising
Other Adelphi activities
Real Life
Weekly Schedule
Contact Information
Personal Background
Teaching
Research
Student Advising
Other Adelphi activities
Real Life
... I'm on leave from Adelphi, working at Google Maps. Contact me there at sbloch@google.com.
I can be reached by telephone at 516-877-4483, or (preferably)
by email, sbloch@adelphi.edu.
(See
GPG key and
Adobe Digital ID key).
FAXes can be sent to me ("Attn: Dr. Bloch") at
516-877-4499.
My textbook, Picturing Programs: an Introduction to Computer Programming, is available in print from College Publications (at Kings College, London), and is also available for download from the textbook web site (donation requested). It's suitable for a high-school-level first programming course, or a "programming for non-majors" course at the college level, or (with some supplementary material) for a CS1 course at the college level.
Since 2001 I've run a series of one-week summer workshops for high school, college, and University faculty on an effective approach to the teaching of introductory computer programming called Program By Design. See what past participants have said about the workshops and the approach. These workshops have been funded by two grants from the National Science Foundation and two from Google's CS4HS Program.
Most of my academic research work concerns itself with computational complexity theory, mathematical logic, or computer science pedagogy. A bibliography is available in various formats.
I have an
Erdös
number of 3, through two paths:
Stephen Bloch -> Jonathan Buss -> Jeff Shallit -> Paul Erdös
Stephen Bloch -> Judy Goldsmith -> Ken Kunen -> Paul Erdös
My academic lineage (from student to doctoral advisor) runs as follows
(according to the Mathematics Genealogy
Project):
Stephen Bloch -> Sam Buss -> Simon Kuchen -> Alonzo Church ->
Oswald Veblen -> E.H. Moore -> H.A. Newton -> Michael Chasles -> Simeon
Poisson -> Joseph Lagrange and Pierre-Simon Laplace.
From Lagrange, it runs to Leonhard Euler -> Johann Bernoulli ->
Jacob Bernoulli and Nikolaus Eglinger.
Before that, the trail branches a lot, but some other names along the
way are Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Nicolaus
Copernicus, and Johannes Müller Regiomontanus.
The two preeminent professional societies for computer scientists are the Association for Computing Machinery and the somewhat more academically-focused Computing Research Association. Within the ACM, the Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory, or ACM SIGACT, concentrates on my area of theoretical computer science.
One of the main professional societies for mathematicians is the American Mathematical Society. Within my mathematical specialty of mathematical logic, the main professional society is the Association for Symbolic Logic.
I spend a significant amount of my time advising students on course
selection, graduate schools, and careers.
For course selection, computer science students are of course welcome
to talk to me in my office hours or by appointment, but you can get a lot
of the information you need from
the CS Program
requirements and the department's
schedules
for upcoming semesters.
Students considering graduate school in computer science should look at the CRA's information resources page, which includes a complete list of Ph.D.-granting computer science programs in North America and a database of information about those departments, so you can decide which would meet your needs.
The Math/CS Department has a job board,
maintained by AfterCollege Job Resource, where you can post your resume and look at job postings that employers
have brought to our attention.
Here's a list of career centers and job
recruiters, for the benefit of students looking for jobs. The
Association for Computing Machinery
also provides a list of (largely, but not entirely, academic) job ads,
as well as career counseling and
resume-posting services for members (I think; I haven't tried it).
For those considering academic jobs, I can also point you to
the Computing Research Association and
the Chronicle
for Higher Education Job Page.
I serve as Faculty Advisor to the
Adelphi Computer Club,
one of whose current projects is a
Web server for Adelphi student
organizations.
The Club is also planning to become an official Student Chapter of the ACM
some day.
I'm also Faculty Advisor and Coach for the Adelphi team in the
ACM Intercollegiate Computer
Programming Contest. We've participated in the Greater New York
Regional Contest each year since 1994 (maybe earlier, but I wasn't here
then).
Since computer science does not exist in a vacuum, I've started taking
quite an interest in its social implications, in particular issues of
privacy and civil liberties. The leading
professional organization dedicated to these issues is
ACM SIGCAS, the ACM Special
Interest Group on Computers And Society.
An enormous list of related reading is at Herman Tavani's Bibliography of Computing, Ethics, and Social Responsibility, and a series of reports on integrating ethical and social issues into computer science education is at the ImpactCS Page.
In the run-up to the 2004 elections, I did some amateur research on Presidents and budget deficits; here are my latest findings.
I live in Richmond Hill, Queens, New York; if you're coming to visit, see
these directions.
On July 8, 1995, I was married to
Deborah Peters.
At right is a picture of Deborah with Odo, our
first retired racing greyhound, who departed this life in October, 2003.
Our second,
Basbeaux, passed on in August, 2004.
We have two more -- Ludo and Thibaut -- but they don't have Web pages
yet.
We've written a page of
pictures and information about our greyhounds.
We started a low-carb diet in April 2003. We both quickly lost a bunch of weight and several clothing sizes, and have kept them off for a year or more; I also saw my blood cholesterol improve (after a brief spike). But I really like baking and eating bread, so I came up with a high-protein, high-fiber, low-carb bread recipe; use it in good health.
Many of my hobbies at the moment involve re-creating various aspects of
everyday life in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,
particularly music, cooking, dance, and tent design. I serve as Webmaster
for the Crown Province of Østgarðr,
the greater New York City area chapter of the
Society for Creative Anachronism.
I'm also a member of the 14th-century living history troupe
La Belle Compagnie
and the tourneying company
The Company of St.
Michael (where my wife and I provide shawm music to accompany
tourneys and pageants).
