About Me
I’m Mike Croucher, Customer Success Engineer at MathWorks where I work with researchers and educators on many different aspects of research computing.
My interests center around research software engineering, high performance and cloud computing and various aspects of machine learning, mathematics and science and I have over 20 years of experience in the field.
Some of my career highlights include
- Developer Advocate and Product Manager for Cloud and Machine Learning at The Numerical Algorithms Group.
- Head of Research IT at University of Leeds
- Co-founder of the University of Sheffield’s Research Software Engineering (RSE) group – one of the first such groups in the UK.
- In 2015 I was the recipient of one the first EPSRC-funded Research Software Engineering Fellowships.
- I have been a strong advocate for the Research Software Engineering movement since its inception. I am a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute. and was co-investigator on the EPSRC RSE-Network grant that helped bootstrap the International RSE association.
- Head of Research Applications Support at University of Manchester
The common thread that binds together all of the roles throughout my career is that I work with the research community to enable them to do computation better. Alternatively, it could be thought of as therapy for a difficult PhD in computational physics.
In this blog I write about things that I find interesting, useful or, ideally, both. It is my hope that others find them interesting and useful too.
My contact details are available at https://www.walkingrandomly.com/?page_id=2055
Selected academic publications
I am co-author on the following
- A generalised framework for detailed classification of swimming paths inside the Morris Water Maze
- Research Software Engineers: State of the Nation Report 2017
- Striving for transparent and credible research: practical guidelines for behavioral ecologists
Selected articles elsewhere
- A Prime Case Study for Making MATLAB Code Go Faster – Published on Loren’s Art of MATLAB
- Super-Charged Fixed Point Iterations Using Anderson Acceleration and the NAG Library – On the NAG blog
- The Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP) Project: Pursuing the never ending quest for performance. Part of #37 of Intel’s Parallel Universe Magazine
Affiliations
Recent Talks
- Rise of the Research Software Engineer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZSaAM8hhJ4&feature=youtu.be
- Is your research Software Correct – https://github.com/mikecroucher/MLPM_talk
- HPC – There’s plenty of room at the bottom – https://mikecroucher.github.io/RedOak/
My social media links
I am active on various social media sites.
- Twitter – https://twitter.com/walkingrandomly
- LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=45662859
- Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/Walkingrandomly
Dear Walking Randomly author,
Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it a 8.6 (Great) score out of (10). Your blog is currently in the top ten
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Hello,
Somehow the feedburner link is broken and will not allow me to subscribe to your blog. I have been subscribed before, and in my old reader it says “an error has occurred” and in my new reader (google reader) I can not connect.
Just wanted to let you know of the issue.
Hi Glenn
Good to hear from you although it’s a shame about the circumstances. I wonder if you were experiencing a temporary glitch? I subscribe to WR myself in order to check that all is well with my feedburner RSS feeed and haven’t come across any problems. Clicking on the feed link in Firefox also works as expected.
Looking at my feedburner stats it seems that there was a massive (but fortunately temporary) drop in google reader subscribers a couple of days ago. Coincidence?
Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on things and I hope you can re-subscribe soon,
Mike
Very nice blog, I’ve linked you in my own (if you don’t want, please tell me and I will remove the link).
Looking for some more tutorial on Mex file and Parallel computing on Matlab……….Nice Blog
Thanks for writing such a nice blog
Attend a presentation by people from NAG and your website was listed in their slides. After quickly reviewing the blog, I have to say you have done a fantastic job, Matlab, R, NAG, statistics categories especially interest me, many thanks.
@Quant – Thanks for saying hello. Glad you like the site (yours looks nice too!). There will be more on NAG soon.
Best Wishes,
Mike
Great site – it was recommended to me by a NAG representative, but there’s plenty more than just NAG stuff here to interest me.
Thanks Liam :)
Extraordinarily clear writing. Will there be a Mathematica textbook?
Hi Mike!
Congratulations on a great blog! Good stuff! Keep it up!
Hi Mike
Not a mathematician by any means, nor programmer, coder or IT specialist, so desperately need urgent help with MATLAB i.e. as in tomorrow and/or Saturday. Can you help and if not can you recommend anyone in the Warrington area – I can travel depending
Great site by the way
Hi Willis
I’m sorry but I missed your message. I hope you got the help you needed.
Best Wishes,
Mike
It is so nice to meet you today, the Master of Matlab.
The articles on MATLAB random number generation and checkpointing in Condor were really useful and very well written. Thanks for taking the time to create them.
Levi
Thanks :)
I have read your article on why a -1 x -1 = +1 and have found it very useful.
I know Sheffield as I did an HND in Hospitality Management, at Sheffield Hallam in 1995.
I soon realised that this wasn’t for me and I went back to college and did a GCSE Higher Tier Maths course and obtained a Grade B. I then did an A Level in Maths and an A Level in Further Maths and completed this in June 2015. I am now studying for a
BSc (Hons)in Mathematics with the Open University and it’s a great course.
Many students just stick to the syllabus, but as Mathematics is my life and passion, I like articles like yours, as I am a Philosopher too.
I’ve made two three-pendulum and one two-pendulum harmonographs out of wood. I wonder what the “curve” of the combined pendulums would be if one could feed paper past the pen or pencil at an even rate. A simple curve would not produce a nice drawing but it seems like it could explain how the pendulums connected by pen arms meeting at one point actually works, i.e., what do the pen arms do. I am not at all good at math, unfortunately, but your equations probably answer my question.