Complexity of Matrix Computations Seminar

Crunching the Matrix

Remembrance for Poincaré

If you have read Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, the name Henri Poincaré might ring a bell. Poincaré was an early twentieth century mathematical master. One of his feats was an analysis of how three masses in mutual orbit behave. This analysis provides the foundation for chaos theory. In Liu’s science fiction book, the […]

Happy 1.1919 day!

Today is January 19, 2019, 1/19/19! The number 1.1919 can be expressed as the fraction and the repeated fraction is . Such a rational day! The number 11919 is itself composite, expressible in terms of the primes 3, 29, and 137. Let’s dive into 11919’s 19 side! The featured image is a 19-sided star, a […]

Calculus and The Mother

Last weekend we spent a beautiful afternoon with cousins at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Delhi. There was a lecture going on about the divine inspiration of Calculus — a meditation on how both Newton and Leibniz came to discoveries of infinite series and limits that led to the starting point for advanced maths. As […]

A good year for Robert Langlands

I just saw that Robert Langlands has won this year’s Abel Prize in mathematics. A month back I had noted that two University of Chicago mathematicians –Sasha Beilinson and Vladimir Drinfeld — had received the Wolf prize for work that builds upon Langlands’ ideas. What are those ideas? Langlands has spent his life looking for connections […]

The geometrical beauty of Doha

As we passed through Doha on the way to Gaborone, I was amazed by the architectural beauty of so many Islamic inspired structures. It was truly a feast for the eyes and mind. Though we did not have time to visit many of the older architectural treasures, I discovered that a lot of the buildings […]

The Wolf prize mathematicians outside my nook

Yesterday I came across a photo of two gentlemen sitting outside of my old grad-school student lounge. They are Sasha Beilinson and Vladimir Drinfeld, two mathematicians from my alma mater who were awarded this year’s Wolf Prize in Mathematics. The CS department at the University of Chicago shared space with Mathematics and Statistics in my […]