Home – James Howard

A Mathematician, a Different Kind of Mathematician, and a Statistician

A Mathematician, a Different Kind of Mathematician, and a Statistician

What I Do

I use mathematics, statistics, software, and artificial intelligence to understand complicated systems—and explain what they mean when people and institutions have to make decisions.

Explore My World

Scholarship

I write about mathematics, operations research, technology, public policy, and the places where they collide. Sometimes this results in papers. Sometimes books. Occasionally something stranger.

Teaching

I teach mathematics and statistics by starting with the problem and working backward to the machinery. Getting the answer matters. Understanding why it works matters more.

Service

Public service is where theory has to survive contact with reality. I have served in local government, the Maryland Defense Force, professional societies, and a collection of other useful places.

Games

I wrote a GURPS supplement about hurricanes. This is either game writing, disaster research, or evidence that I will turn almost anything into a project.

My Books

I have written and edited books on numerical analysis, online mathematics education, flood insurance, and military operations research. Apparently I do not believe in picking a lane.

Media Appearance

Every so often somebody asks me to explain something on television, radio, or in print. I generally say yes, because explaining complicated things is most of the fun.

Software

I have been writing software since Unix boxes were considerably more annoying. Some of it solves real problems; some of it exists because I wanted to know whether the idea would work.

Most Recent Posts

Sep 10

GitHub's Ongoing Actions Outage

I have two little production systems running in GitHub Actions. One, Krigsbot, wakes up every morning, looks for environmental and polar news, makes some editorial decisions, and queues a day’s...

Sep 03

The Sky Is Falling

The BBC published a story this morning about the Netherlands moving part of its national gold reserve from North America to London. BBC article Ordinarily, this would not be particularly...

Aug 25

A Maintenance Plan for Memory

The United States maintains thousands of buoys. They are numbered, charted, lit, and serviced on a schedule. Every one of them says some version of the same thing, which is...

Aug 11

The Fatal Image Is Now Open

I have built a virtual museum exhibition. This was not the plan. Judith and Holofernes: The Fatal Image is now open at judith.jameshoward.us. It brings together 58 works depicting Judith,...

Jul 30

Effective Challenge Is Now Optional

On April 17, 2026, the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took the most battle-tested governance framework in American...

Jul 27

When Every Bank's AI Fails Together

Financial regulation is built on a useful fiction: that banks make mistakes independently of one another. This assumption underpins diversification requirements, stress testing methodology, and most of what the Federal...

Jul 22

What We Do Now

The history of artificial intelligence is a history of a moving target. The first machine decision was a thermostat closing a circuit. The field got its name at Dartmouth in...

Jul 08

The Naming Problem

In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in a six-game match. It was treated as a milestone in artificial intelligence. Researchers debated what the victory...

Blog

The archive: essays, explainers, arguments, side quests, and things I apparently needed to calculate.

Dive Deeper into My Universe

Honors

Professional honors, civic awards, fellowships, medals, and a few things that require considerably more explanation than the others.

Coat of Arms

Yes, I have a coat of arms. Here are the grant, the design, the history, and considerably more heraldry than anyone reasonably needs.

Ancestry

Genealogy is mostly an exercise in refusing to believe family stories until the paperwork shows up. Here are the ancestors, records, societies, and evidence.