A strange, nerdy tribute to Sam Roweis (1972—2010).
Sam had a profound influence on my life when I was a young man and I miss him dearly.
A while back when I was still actively mourning Sam's death, I ended up reading his notes page for probably the 50th time. I found his notes on matrix identities particularly useful; even since the introduction of documents like the Matrix Cookbook, Sam's notes were particularly straightforward. His list of matrix calculus identities was a great help on numerous occasions.
I noticed a spelling mistake. Jacobian spelt Jacobain. And sometimes in the past I have wanted to copy and paste the LaTeX source, but haven't had access to it.
In some bizarre flight of fancy one afternoon several years ago, I decided to recreate the LaTeX source from the PDF file. I decided I might as well put the result online.
This roughly recreates this document found, at the time of writing, on Sam's NYU website. Re-hosting it here in source form serves several purposes:
- It allows for its impact to proceed if and when NYU ceases to host his website,
- It allows for the document to grow, be corrected, and so on,
- It hopefully will make more people aware of this useful set of notes, and in that small way, honour Sam's memory.
I'd eventually like to get around to his Gaussian identities cheat sheet.
You can read Sam's publications via this Google Scholar page. You can view some of his recorded lectures via VideoLectures.net, and this talk about his work on speech recognition.
You can read a posthumous biography by the American Astronomical Society, owing to his involvement in automated astrometry towards the end of his life. There's another biography on a memorial blog that contains many reminiscences of his friends.