Taylor Smith

@taylorjsmith.bsky.social

585 Followers 202 Following

🇨🇦 Theoretical computer scientist. Assistant professor at @stfx-university.bsky.social. Website: taylorjsmith.xyz.

The first page of our preprint, "Generating Fibonacci Words via the Prefix-Suffix Duplication Operation".
A screenshot of Google Scholar congratulating me on reaching 100 (actually, 102) citations to my various research works. Some very colourful balloons float above a chart showing citations slowly accumulating over the years.
A screenshot of Tables 1 and 2 from my paper, summarizing the decidability status of various problems for various models of 2D automata.
The first page of my preprint, "Complexity of Universality and Related Decision Problems for Unary Two-Dimensional Automata".
The cover of the proceedings for "Implementation and Application of Automata: 30th International Conference, CIAA 2026", LNCS 16695, edited by yours truly.
A photograph of former Governor General Mary Simon and others at the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards ceremony in 2024. We're both on the balcony; I'm seated a few rows behind her.
A photo of the flag of the Governor General of Canada. The flag is royal blue with a crowned yellow lion, holding a red maple leaf and standing on a red and white wreath.
The cover of the proceedings for "Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems: 27th IFIP WG 1.02 International Conference, DCFS 2026", LNCS 16681, edited by Cezar Câmpeanu, Luca Prigioniero, and yours truly.
A screenshot of a thread of Twitter posts. The thread reads: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (@samth): "Why did CACM just publish a blog post by a B2B SAAS guy about how he's in the middle of vibe-proving P vs NP? What possible editorial process could this have gone through? @vardi" Moshe Vardi (@vardi): "Entertainment :-)" Sam: "Genuinely, this is incredibly disappointing from what is supposedly the flagship product of our professional society." Moshe: "It is a blog. Get over yourself."
An excerpt from Peter Hacker's 2015 article "How the Tractatus was Meant to be Read". The excerpt reads: "It is on this basis that Wittgenstein proceeds to construct his tree, working level by level. It would no more have been possible to compose the Tractatus in the sequential order of the published text than it would be to paint an original painting complete from left to right (in the way a laser printer reproduces a painting). Rather, the text is built up not by vertical descent, but by horizontal level, every train of thought being followed through as far as possible on the same level of the tree, and only subsequently elaborated on a deeper level of elucidation. By p. 5 of MS 104 (the third page of the text), when he has added a further 26 propositions, the tree, as Dr Bazzocchi explains, looks like this: [illustration of a tree depicting the structure of the text]"
Meme image of a man in silhouette, standing in front of a sunset, holding his arms aloft and breaking a chain that once connected his wrists.
A figure depicting the iterated pedal triangle construction process for an almost-equilateral triangle. The process takes seven iterations before the resultant pedal triangle is similar to the original triangle.
A passage from my 2017 master's thesis. The relevant portion reads: "A calculation reveals that \psi_2(2, n) is equal to the number of pedal triangles with period n. Presently, it is not known whether there exists a connection between pedal triangles of period n and two-dimensional primitive words of dimension 2xn over a two-letter alphabet, but the fact that the two enumerations agree suggests some sort of bijection between these objects."
An illustration of an example pedal triangle.
The first page of my preprint, "Primitive Two-Dimensional Words and Iterated Pedal Triangles via Symbolic Coding".
A screenshot of the DBLP page for the journal "Discrete Mathematics". The page lists volumes published by year. Between 2006 and 2013, and between 2015 and 2026, one volume was published per year. In 2014, for some reason, 23 volumes were published.
A screenshot of an assignment question I wrote. It reads: "In the Astadhyayi, Panini developed a grammar for the Sanskrit language. Here, we will use the grammar for a very small subset of Sanskrit. Consider the following four Sanskrit root words: bhu (to be), kr (to do), path (to read), likh (to write), and vad (to speak). Sanskrit combines root words with endings that depend on the grammatical person and number: - First person singular: ami - First person plural: amah - Second person singular: asi - Second person plural: tha - Third person singular: ti - Third person plural: anti For example, to say "I read" in Sanskrit, you would say pathami. Like Panini, we can develop some grammar rules to form Sanskrit words: - word -> stem ending - stem -> root a - a a -> a (sandhi vowel contraction rule) - bhu -> a (guna vowel gradation rule) - kr a -> kara (guna vowel gradation rule) Using our grammar rules, how can we derive the following words? (a) pathami ("I read", first person singular) (b) likhamah ("we write", first person plural) (c) vadasi ("you speak", second person singular) (d) karatha ("you [all] do", second person plural) (e) bhavanti ("they are", third person plural)"
A screenshot of an ad from Best Buy Canada. The first product shown in the ad carousel is an anatomical model of a “mammary gland in lactation” from Walter Products. It looks exactly like what you think it is.
A Twitter thread posted by Aalok Thakkar (@AalokDThakkar) on Mar. 22, 2026. The tweets read, in order: 1. "While there is a dearth of women in computer science, another problem is that the women who are in CS often become invisible. I’ve been teaching Theory of Computation and have comfortably used photos of Turing, Church, and even problematic figures like Minsky and Chomsky." 2. "Only today did I learn that Greibach, of Greibach Normal Form, is a woman. Sheila Adele Greibach is an Emeritus Professor at the UCLA and has worked extensively on contex-free and context-sensitive languages, parsing, automata, and decidability problems." 3. "There are so many excellent women in computer science doing foundational and groundbreaking work. I hope we (I) get better at naming their work, showing their photos, and telling their stories when we teach. This visibility shapes who feels like they belong."
A group photo from the CIAA 2018 conference.
A screenshot of the current version (as of today) of the Wikipedia article on Atlantic City algorithms. The claim of the origin of the term has been removed, and the text has been cleaned up slightly.
A screenshot of the cover page of Princeton EECS Technical Report 297, "Comparison of Probabilistic Tests for Primality", published in 1982 by James Finn.
An excerpt from Bach and Shallit's 1996 text "Algorithmic Number Theory". It reads "The name "Atlantic City" was first used by J. Finn [1982a]."
A photo of the waterfront at dusk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Like Las Vegas, the large buildings are lit up in bright lights and neon and extend to the horizon, contrasting the darkening waves rolling on the shore.
A photo of Las Vegas at night. The grandiose buildings and attractions are all illuminated in bright lights and neon.
An illustration of my brand-new (digital) IEEE senior membership card, with appropriate personal details censored, of course.
A screenshot of three social media posts in a thread. The first post reads "If your surname is the name of a profession, you probably shouldn't give your son a first name that's the name of a different profession, it's confusing". The second post reads "Taylor Smith. Hunter Baker". The third post reads "I read Taylor Smith and I thought about Taylor Swift but completely forgot that Smith wasn't her last name. So for 30 seconds in my head Taylor Smith was a real celebrity."
A Magic: The Gathering card from the forthcoming "Secrets of Strixhaven" set. The card is titled "Mathemagics". At a cost of 2B2X mana, the "target player draws 2^X cards".
A clip from the television show "Dilbert". Dilbert: "What are you doing?" Dogbert: "I'm posting false information on the web." Dilbert: "Why?" Dogbert: "It's fun. Someone picks up a strand of false information, spreads it around, and before you know it, a panic is created. Then you just sit back and watch the chaos." Dilbert: "And figure out a way to exploit it, no doubt?" Dogbert: "You say that as if it's a bad thing." Dilbert: "I don't think that is what the World Wide Web was created for." Dogbert: "Ah, that's where you're wrong. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to spread rumours before? Mailings, cold calling, sometimes I had to go door-to-door. It was a real pain. Thanks to the new technology, my productivity has increased. Just in the last couple of years, I've been able to create fear about cell phones, power lines, and organ theft rings." Dilbert: "You must be very proud." Dogbert: "It's fulfilling."
A footnote from Copeland's book "The Essential Turing". It reads: "Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 42 (1936–7), 230–65. The publication date of ‘On Computable Numbers’ is sometimes cited, incorrectly, as 1937. The article was published in two parts, both parts appearing in 1936. The break between the two parts occurred, rather inelegantly, in the middle of Section 5, at the bottom of p. 240 (p. 67 in the present volume). Pages 230–40 appeared in part 3 of volume 42, issued on 30 Nov. 1936, and the remainder of the article appeared in part 4, issued on 23 Dec. 1936. This information is given on the title pages of parts 3 and 4 of volume 42, which show the contents of each part and their dates of issue. (I am grateful to Robert Soare for sending me these pages. See R. I. Soare, ‘Computability and Recursion’, Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 2 (1996), 284–321.) The article was published bearing the information ‘Received 28 May, 1936.—Read 12 November, 1936.’ However, Turing was in the United States on 12 November, having left England in September 1936 for what was to be a stay of almost two years (see the introductions to Chapters 3 and 4). Although papers were read at the meetings of the London Mathematical Society, many of those published in the Proceedings were ‘taken as read’, the author not necessarily being present at the meeting in question. Mysteriously, the minutes of the meeting held on 18 June 1936 list ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs- problem’ as one of 22 papers taken as read at that meeting. The minutes of an Annual General Meeting held [...]"
A map of my flight history in 2025. I flew a total of 30619km, with a fair share of that distance coming from a couple of trans-Atlantic flights from Canada to England and back again.
The cover of the first edition of “Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation” by Hopcroft and Ullman.
A photo of my family’s Christmas tree in the living room of the house, adorned with coloured strings of lights, decades of ornaments, and a very retro-looking angel up top encircled by yet more coloured lights.
A photo of two homemade shortbread cookies and one pack of Biscoff cookies, on a napkin sitting on my lap.
The logo of the DCFS 2026 conference.
The logo of the CIAA 2026 conference.
A screenshot of part of an email I received. The greeting reads "Good Morning Benevolent Professor".
A pie chart of books in my personal library sorted by LCC classification. The largest proportion of books (34.7%) fall under the "Language and Literature" category. The next-largest categories are "Science" (28.0%), "History of the Americas" (9.8%), and "Social Sciences" (5.5%).
The first page of my paper, "Improved Randomized Approximation of Hard Universality and Emptiness Problems", coauthored with Pantelis Andreou of Dalhousie University and Stavros Konstantinidis of Saint Mary's University.
A photo of (most of) the Oxford Illustrated Dickens book set, sitting on a side table in front of my already-full bookshelves.
A scatterplot comparing "number of Home Hardware commercials during game" to "Blue Jays run differential". The data are tightly correlated with r = 0.9945.
Page 6 of the midterm. Question 5 asks (a) to describe an algorithm to decide CFG membership, (b) to apply the algorithm from part (a) to a given CFG, and (c) to determine how many derivations are needed to check whether a given word belongs to the language of the CFG from part (b). My answers take up the rest of the page.
Page 5 of the midterm. Question 4 asks (a) whether the language L = {w in {a,b,c}* | #a(w) = #b(w)} is regular, and (b) whether the same language L is context-free. My answers take up the rest of the page.
Page 4 of the midterm. Question 3 asks (a) whether L1 = L2 if and only if L1* = L2* for all regular languages L1 and L2, (b) whether every infinite regular language is the complement of a finite regular language, and (c) whether (empty set union empty set*) intersection (complement-of-empty-set minus (empty set concatenated with empty set*)) = empty set. My answers take up the rest of the page.
Page 3 of the midterm. Question 2 asks (a) how to decide whether the cardinality of the language of an NFA is smaller than the cardinality of the language of a regular expression, and (b) how to decide whether the language of a context-free grammar is a subset of the language of a regular expression. My answers to both parts take up the rest of the page.
Page 2 of the midterm. Question 1 asks (a) to describe the algorithm to convert a regular expression to an NFA, (b) to construct an NFA equivalent to the regular expression (a* union b*)*, and (c) to construct a minimal DFA equivalent to the NFA from part (b). My answers to parts (a) and (b) take up the rest of the page.
A photo of my midterm from the course "Foundations of Computer Science", which I wrote as an undergrad student on October 29, 2013. The front page lists all the standard examination instructions, but more eye-catching is my grade written in red ink in the middle of the page: "52 -> 66". The midterm was marked out of 100.
A photo of my boarding pass from a recent flight. The remarks section contains two codes: BAG1 (I have a checked bag) and WEAP (that checked bag contains something “special” inside).
A photo of my air pistol, a Steyr LP2, lying on top of its case. Underneath the barrel is a red ribbon attached to a silver medal from the Canadian Pistol National Championships.
A photo of a tall off-white stone building now called the Colonnade Hotel, Warrington Crescent, London.
A photo of the famous “complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper” tablet in the British Museum.
A photo from inside Alan Turing’s office in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park.
A photo of a cupcake with an adornment on top of the frosting. The adornment is an illustration of a four-state Turing machine. The states are labelled D, C, F, and S (since the conference is called DCFS).
The poem "Algorhyme" by Radia Perlman. The text reads: I think that I shall never see A graph more lovely than a tree. A tree whose crucial property Is loop-free connectivity. A tree that must be sure to span So packets can reach every LAN. First, the root must be selected. By ID, it is elected. Least-cost paths from root are traced. In the tree, these paths are placed. A mesh is made by folks like me, Then bridges find a spanning tree.
A formula representing pi as a “continued fraction”. The formula reads pi = 3 + (1 + (4 + (1 + …) / 10) / 10) / 10. If the joke isn’t immediately obvious, this is just a way of writing out pi using nested fractions instead of decimals.
A meme of a staring cat. The image has been edited to make it appear as if the cat is holding a fan of money. Text above the cat's head reads "i be checking my own [Rate My Professor] reviews like... damn what the goat up to?"
An article published in the New York Times on June 13, 2025. The headline reads "They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling." The lede underneath continues: "Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality."
A photo of two bookshelves in my living room. The shelves are nearly full of books, extending up to the top parts of each shelf. In front of the shelves is a comfortable reading chair, and to the left of the shelves is a record player on top of a smaller shelf full of records.
The Great Seal of Canada during Queen Elizabeth II's reign. At the centre of the seal is a depiction of Elizabeth II sitting on a throne, wearing St. Edward's Crown and holding the Sovereign's Sceptre and Orb. Surrounding the design is the text "Elizabeth II - Queen of Canada - Reine du Canada".
A screenshot from the copyright page of my OER book, "Theory of Computing: An Open Introduction". The highlighted segment of the page contains a prohibition symbol encircling two "AI stars" above the text "No artificial intelligence was used in the writing of this work."