Simply irresistible

I hope no one at this conference chooses to speak about acyclic graphs; the audience might not see the forest for the trees.

Art, technically

Seed magazine interviewed Matmos, ostensibly about their use of an enigma machine in their forthcoming album, although their conversation turned more generally to their use of "scientific" sources in their music. Who knew that one of the fringe benefits of getting Ph.D. in English would turn out to be access to the vaults of a cryptography research company?

Matmos, as well as their more well-known collaborator, perform a truly amazing feat; they produce art that is positively brilliant and at the same time accessible. I suspect that this ability comes out of having impeccable technique and formidable instinct while having the ear steeped in popular musical culture.

Russian reveals result, refuses reward

The previously mentioned G. Perelman has surprised the world by insisting that he not be seen as a "figurehead".

But, hey, someone's got to win the prizes, and A. Okounkov, W. Werner and T. Tao seem happy to oblige.

Stacks!

Stacks are one of the most fundamental abstract data structures in computer science, providing most with their first exposure to dynamic memory allocation. And as E. LaForest explains, they can also serve in place of registers in a processor core, potentially with a dramatic performance benefit. I'm curious to see how far this technology can go; will we have stack-based handhelds in ten years? Will CS undergrads bemoan their Forth class as they now do of C++?

How many mathematicians does it take to prove the Poincaré conjecture?

Perhaps a better question would be "How many math-months does it take to prove it?"^* It's been three years since the Perelman program was announced, about 30 since Thurston's geometrization conjecture, and 102 since Poincaré first declared that the 3-sphere was unique among 3-manifolds for having trivial fundamental group; there were, of course, many more stops along the way. The answers to those questions are probably much larger than I would care to guess.

So, who's working on P vs NP?

*While the man-month is said to be mythical, I suspect the "mathematician-month" to be a realistic unit of measurement.

Sometimes all you need is three pages

Do you know how to increase the volume of a cardboard box by crushing it? I. Pak does. And he shows the world how to do it in

Inflating the cube without stretching
I. Pak

That's definitely the most enjoyable paper I 've read in a while.

High Performance

I now have an account on Jacquard for the purpose of parallel programming, which I'll be getting into later this summer. I would imagine it's not unlike sitting in the driver's seat of a Lotus.

Those who are concerned about how I might use all this power can rest easy; I've agreed not to use it to develop weapons of mass destruction, and I am forbidden from using it on behalf of citizens of certain countries.

These robes were made for walking

Note the bell-shaped sleeves and velvet; that's what sets us Doctors apart from the mere Masters, or (I'm loath even to say it) the Bachelors.


In all seriousness, it's great to have had the degree conferred upon me, even if my transcript still lacks the Regents' imprimatur.

Thanks to Andy for being there with his camera!

Irrationally effective

Everyone knows that e has some nice combinatorial properties, but occasionally a counting result comes along that transcends the well-known mundanity of cute factorials.

Counting and Computing by e
M. Hassani

The problem that just won't go away

Do you like maps? Do you like colors? Do you like coloring maps? Do you like signed permutations? I like signed permutations because they describe genetic mutations. I also like the fact that maybe, just maybe, there's a connection between mutations and how many colors are necessary for map-making.

Signed permutations and the four color theorem
S. Eliahou, C. Lecouvey

Cubicles have no doors

While I, unlike the heroes of this comic strip, am quite productive at my workplace, I am highly attuned to passersby. My back is to the entry-break in the carpeted wall, so my reactions are as follows:

1. When I do not have headphones on, I turn to look every time someone passes by;
2. When I have headphones on, I am startled by a tap on my shoulder by whoever needs my attention.

The first is less disruptive, but more frequent, so there is clearly an optimization problem buried here. In either case, it is clear why the principles of feng shui dictate that one should always have a clear view of the entrance to their space.

When does a hiatus become a leave of absence?

Abject apologies to those who would like to have read more frequent musings in this space. You have witnessed the effect of finishing a doctoral dissertation. After a decent run of at-least-weekly posts, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to keep it up during my home stretch. Having recently begun a transition to a new phase of my career, I expect to be able to devote an appropriate amount of time to this pursuit again.

I guess you can write a paper about just about anything these days

But I really shouldn't be so harsh. The authors suggest that their work "rediscovers" a lost proof of a very interesting set theoretic result. And attention-grabbing titles can only help to spice up the literature-scape.

Division by three
Peter G. Doyle, John Horton Conway

The new generation of audio ransom note

Wired's music guy, E. Van Buskirk, interviewed S. König about his software project cum musical mash-up collage tool cum political statement on intellectual property, sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!. It's not only an interesting idea, but there are also numerous computational challenges to making it work, and work so well. I want to know how he does all that! I suppose I'll find out when it gets sourceforged.

Freed from economic and social constraints, I would volunteer to work on this without a second thought.

Limited options precipitate creativity

All mathematicians (and many others) immediately recognize the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 as the first few Fibonacci numbers. In this article, G. K. Pincus proposes a new poetic form, the fib, whose line lengths (measured in syllables) are given by these numbers.

At first, I suspected that most such verses would simply be twenty syllables of English prose broken up to fit the "design parameters". After all, history is full of awkward attempts to use mathematical toys such as the Fibonacci senquence as a basis for art. However, after reading some contributions from the comments to the original post, as well as those featured in a follow-up article, I've found that this form has a real character to it. The first four lines are short and punchy, almost primal; the last two lines seem locquacious by comparison, allowing an outpour of articulate expression. It seems that Pincus struck that delicate balance of constraint; both sufficient to focus creative drive while relaxed enough to prevent the output from being artificial and bland.

Good?
Bad?
Great? Poor?
I'm no judge
Of this kind of thing,
But I know I like what I see.

Pants are one thing, but this is ridiculous

Pants to the power of two? And how did they get a a tree, anyway? Perhaps they were assisted by monkeys?

Squarepants in a Tree: Sum of Subtree Clustering and Hyperbolic Pants Decomposition
David Eppstein

Pachterian geometry

The hardest midterm I ever took was a Numerical Analysis take-home exam. One problem asked for a definition of "the circle that best approximates four co-planar points" and apply our definition to given data. This problem has clear applications to transceiver placement optimization; e.g., where to put a cell phone tower. The model discussed in this preprint describes not only multiple transciever locations, but also the cost to power a signal within a given radius from each tower. It's rare and wonderful to see a real world problem that translates so naturally to a mathematical model.

The professor for the above mentioned Numerical Analysis course, L. Pachter, has some geometric concerns of his own. In this case, the translation from real world problem to mathematical model is considerably harder to understand, mostly because the geometry does not take place in a plane or 3-space. The fundamental object is still a convex body, but it now lives in a larger number of dimensions. Don't let this scare you off; such models are extremely effective for countless applications.

But what about $K_5$ and $K_3,3$?

As a dear friend once told me, everyone should take time to play games. Here's one that I think my reader(s) will enjoy. In fact, I think (t)he(y) may have already. I'd really love to see it played on a 2-torus.

Human Experience Engineering

Last December C. Wetherell, a Google software engineer, told me that his next twenty-percent project would be an algorithm for love. It seems to have entered beta.

Complimentarily, Red Robot of Diesel Sweeties has been honing an algorithm for hate. While I would not take on such a research program myself, I commend him for this endeavor, as it progresses our overall understanding of emotional algorithms. Perhaps Google should recruit Red Robot to be their new Director of Human Experience Engineering.

Perhaps a more practical approach would be for Google to acquire an anti-social networking site, such as Snubster, or perhaps adapt Orkut to this end.

The high TeX arXiv

Numerous posts of mine point to the arXiv, the famous "e-print" server managed by Cornell University. Those at the helm of this marvelous resource have always ridden the leading edge of internet usage. For instance, consider this decade-old page, in which they point out that "... large databases such as this one (which has millions of distinct URL's that lead to gigabytes of data) are likely to grow ever more commonly exported via www." At the time, such archives were commonly hosted on an ftp server. How many of today's internet users even know what ftp stands for?

Fortunately, Cornell's e-librarians are eager to support new internet technologies, such as rss and trackback, at least on an experimental basis. For some reason, this is not widely publicized; perhaps they don't want too many users to become dependent on such features, ensuring that they can be removed without warning while causing minimal disruption. If you are a Physicist, Mathematician, Non-linear Dynamacist, Computer Scientist, or Quantitative Biologist, take advantage of these informational tools; they're there for the using.