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.
Heading back from New York City last weekend I was amazed to see an updated station stop display (graph) on the E train to JFK. I don’t have a video, but you can see the how it updates the destinations (I didn’t notice eta) below — a list of next stops shifts to the right:
But wait, something is off!
My colleague Boris Gorelik had posted a piece entitled How to make a graph less readable? Rotate the text labels arguing that rotation of the axis labels imposes a processing cost on the reader. Keep the text aligned. Wouldn’t moving the destination labels up and down as Boris suggests save the jostled E train rider precious milliseconds?
We visited Maun with our family in December. Located near the eastern edge of the Okavango delta, it possesses a still, quiet beauty.
We took a short plane ride over the delta. As I look again at the images taken that day, I am struck by the fractal quality of the images.
How do you assess the “fractalness” of an image? I suppose that it has to do with the degree to which the image can be described by a self-similar patterns, hints of the same regularity as you zoom closer in. It looks like natural landscapes exhibit fractal qualities only over limited scales — perhaps 2 or 3 dimensions at most.
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 day, so it was not unusual to encounter mathematicians while having lunch (or a nap) in the lounge. There have been many usefulcollaborations and intersections between these departments.
I have no idea what Sasha or Vladimir do. I tried to understand. I glanced at their ground breaking work, a book called Chiral algebras. They state in the introduction “Chiral algebras have their origin in mathematical physics;” and “Chiral algebras are “quantum” objects.” Ok.
Drinfeld and Beilinson still run the Geometric Langlands Seminar that of course captures the essence of what they care about most. As best I can figure, Langlands,himself a 1996 Wolf prize recipient, is a mathematician who envisioned building links between algebra and modern physics. Drinfeld and Beilinson have extended that work. Maybe the best explanation of this undertaking is provided by Edward Frenkel.
If Frenkel is still too abstract for you, then Mitya Boyarchenko suggests that this poem that I include below might be of use in understanding the Langlands talks
A man called Pakhomych, shaking as he rode on the carriage footboards,
Carried a bunch of forget-me-nots.
He got corn on his heels,
And treated them at home with camphor.
Reader! Having discarded the fable’s forget-me-nots,
I found the piece illuminating, not only for the nicely presented graphs of customer/sales interactions, but also for the exposition on sales terminology (I learned what a cadence is).
Does SalesLoft have other insights they’d like to share? Many data scientists would like to know!
It is really heartening that discrete geometry and other branches of advanced mathematics can be use to preserve democracy — much in the spirit of the 1964 voting rights act (being signed in the featured image).
Tufts University mathematician Moon Duchin has done a lot of work in this area, leading the effort to train mathematicians to be expert witnesses in gerrymandering cases. Duchin’s Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group page has a lot of useful resources.
Consider registering for one of the gerrymandering trainings if you’re a mathematician, statistician, or data scientist based in the Bay Area!
In the US, the African American scholar (and February 1st Google doodle subject) Carter G Woodson began working in 1926 to establish “Negro History Week“, for in Woodson’s day the contributions of Black people were “overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.” Woodson’s Negro History week evolved into today’s US Black History Month thanks to the efforts of student activists of the 1970s.
My partner, Dr Gayatri Sethi, reminds me that the aspiration of marginalized and minoritized peoples to be heard, to enter into equity in whatever place they call home is universal.
Building an equitable mathematics community, or better yet an equitable world, should not be confined to a single month — it is an undertaking that will require continuous and deliberate effort. But it is encouraging and inspiring to see many hopeful signs on a global scale.
Do you know of similar efforts in other countries to encourage the participation of marginalized peoples in science and mathematics? If so, please leave a comment or drop an email!
