Epic Struggles in Mathematics

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fields medal frontI have this problem: I don’t really have enough hours in each day. One of the symptoms of this problem is a huge pile of unread or partially read issues of the New Yorker. Sometimes I try to catch up. This catching up is incomplete, of course, and sometimes I miss articles of direct relevance to my field. Sometimes I miss them even when they are in an issue I skimmed through, promising to read later more thoroughly. This time, I missed the August 28th article called “Manifold Destiny” (by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber), about the quest of some mathematicians to understand the Poincare conjecture. The subtitle of the article in the table of contents is “Who really solved the Poincare conjecture?”. The story starts out with a report on a talk at the Strings 2006 conference in Beijing.

[Update: After reading the below, do read this post about the letter (apparently from Yau’s lawyer) about the issue. His being painted in the role of villain may have been rather over the top, and the writers may have not behaved very well at all… so the word “masterpiece” I used below may well be totally wrong. I’m so glad that I wrote the cautionary remarks at the end now.]

As a piece of writing for the non-mathematician’s consumption, it is another New Yorker masterpiece. It is of course several pages long, and so there’s plenty of meat Click to continue reading this post →

The Science, Art, and Mathematics of Origami

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origami dancing craneOne of my hobbies for a while when I was a young ‘un was origami. It was swiftly overtaken by other arts and crafts, and these were hobbies long before I started taking apart cameras and radios, and the like, to see how they worked, and collecting pondwater and pressing leaves and…

In retrospect, I think it might be obvious that (obstacles aside) I had a good chance of becoming a theoretical physicist. A lot of those arts and crafts hobbies were all about intricate patterns of one sort or another. I loved that stuff, although I did not think of it as mathematics… just a nice pattern. And I was drawn to playing with and creating those patterns. Some of them are amazing, as you know from staring at whatever your mum or grandmother is working on right now. Or perhaps you. I’ll tell you about more of that some other time. Let’s get back dancing crane pattern to origami. I stumbled upon (via NPR) an excellent website, that of Robert J. Lang. It is quite wonderful. The site tells you about Lang’s work, and shows you a ton of it. But the best thing of all is that it tells you about the Art, Science and Mathematics of it all together. The engineering applications of origami are growing as well. These include developing the best way of folding airbags for ready deployment, and the problem of how to fold up a giant array of solar panels on a spacecraft so that they can be successfully unfolded and put into use once the craft gets into space.

Imagine also the problem in a scientific context of how to design arrays of mirrors with Click to continue reading this post →

And Then Two Come Along At Once….

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Roy HargroveSo I learned earlier this week that one of my favourite young trumpeters, Roy Hargrove is going to be at the Catalina Bar and Grill from Wednesday through this weekend…

James Carter …and -bizarrely enough- one of my favourite young saxophonists, James Carter is going to be at the Jazz Bakery precisely the same dates!

So it is going to be quite a weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve seen either of these guys (not since the Village Vanguard in New York, I think… Happy days.). Of course I must go and see them, for old times sake, and to make some new times….

(Photos by Tony Gieske and Zappan (see here, respectively.))

-cvj

When The Levees Broke

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I just happened upon the middle of Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” , which is on HBO (it is an HBO film, I think). I was transfixed, and horrified, all over again. I’ve set the system to record the next showing of all four acts in their entirety, and it is at the top of my viewing priorities. If you have not seen it, I recommend it, from the 20 minutes I’ve seen so far alone. Spike Lee looks to have done an excellent job. It is a documentary, to be sure, with the faces and voices of the people affected and involved on camera a great deal of the time, and it is also definitely a Spike Lee film in terms of look and feel and, of course, Terrence Blanchard’s music. See the synopsis (along with interviews with Lee) on HBO’s site here. Extract:

“New Orleans is fighting for its life,” says Lee. “These are not people who will disappear quietly – they’re accustomed to hardship and slights, and they’ll fight for New Orleans. This film will showcase the struggle for New Orleans by focusing on the profound loss, as well as the indomitable spirit of New Orleaneans.”

The first thing that springs to mind (other than the thoughts inspired by the content itself, most of which I am sure you’ve had yourself) is: Why is this not being shown in every movie theatre in the country? Documentaries have come back, right? We’ve all gone to see Michael Moore’s cleverly edited and scripted documentaries on various political issues. We’ve gone to see the even more cleverly edited and (oh yes) carefully scripted documentary “The March of the Penguins” and came away weeping at the thought that in 50 years, all that may be gone…. etc, etc. Should we not all be turning out in numbers to see this, showing events where actual human beings were lost and abandoned, in huge numbers? Families destroyed, lives torn assunder? Where the heart of so much of our culture was destroyed? If not, why not? I don’t care that it is 4 hours long. That’s not a good enough argument.

-cvj

Bullet Not Silver?

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I learned from New Scientist just now that various researchers working on modified gravity theories are casting doubt on the direct evidence of Dark Matter that was presented by Douglas Clowe and collaborators a few weeks ago. Recall an earlier post on it, here, and Sean Carroll’s post with more detail here.

Some quotes from the New Scientist article, written by Stuart Clark:

“One should not draw premature conclusions about the existence of dark matter without a careful analysis of alternative gravity theories,” writes John Moffat, of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada

There’s more in the paper astro-ph/0608675, where there is an analysis of the gravitational lensing seen in the merging cluster observations. Recall that the it is the lensing that was used as a key part of the story to show the separation of the dark matter from the ordinary matter. Moffat claims that this lensing can be explained in his modified gravity theory, “MOG”. There’s a real calculation suggesting this, apparently, although a full computation is still in progress:

Moffat has worked this out for the Bullet cluster using a one-dimensional model, and is now trying to extend this to two dimensions. If he succeeds, it will contradict Clowe’s direct evidence of dark matter.

(In other words, Moffat has not worked this out for the Bullet cluster.)

In related work,

HongSheng Zhao of the University of St Andrews in the UK and his collaborators applied a theory of modified gravity called TeVeS to the Bullet cluster.

This theory uses at least one extra field, which kicks in to affect the modification when Click to continue reading this post →

Help Ads As News

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Impressively, Stephen Hawking seems to have the Guardian newspaper doing his “help wanted” ads for him by cunningly disguising them as news articles. I spotted this here, in the Education section. I’ve no idea what this means, but it seems rather odd to me. Anyway, I’m knowingly passing on the information about the search, I suppose, by blogging it. So there. Go look at it, read the particulars, and get in touch with Cambridge if you’ve got “the right stuff”.

-cvj

The String Doll Gang

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Actually, it’s even better than I thought! There’s a whole collection called “The String Doll Gang”. Here are some of them (click for larger):

  string doll gang   string doll gang

Cute aren’t they? Yes, each apparently made of onecontinuouspieceofstring. More about them, and closeups (and prices) at this site.

Now, being a responsible citizen and all, I can’t discourage you enough from trying to match various members of the real live string community to these dolls. That would be a bad thing to do. Bad!

-cvj

Harvests Present and Future?

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The corn has matured (they’re less full because of low volume of watering while I was away… but that’s ok… they’ll taste great!), and I’ve got a huge corgette/zucchini for my trouble. Must get around to harvesting the peas soon.

harvestharvestfuture harvest?

Upcoming…. that flower promises a tasty patty-pan squash in my future…..

-cvj

The Stampede

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So this semester, at the request/suggestion of the people who bring USC freshmen the Freshman Seminars, KC Cole and I started a new course. Turned out we were brought in to replace another professor who was originally billed to do what looks to be an Art appreciation course. Looked good. The title was “The Art of Seeing and the Seeing of Art”. For whatever reason, that professor was no longer doing it, and relatively late in the day we were asked if we wanted to do a seminar, and it would be one of two freshman seminars that meets from 2:00-3:50 (or so) each Wednesday afternoon and deliberately engages with the events of the Visions and Voices programme. (See earlier blog post about that programme.)

Well, of course KC and I thought that we’d have fun with this, by mixing art and science and… everything else together. So we changed the title to “The Art and Science of Seeing, and the Seeing and Science of Art”. Heh.

The first meeting of the course, we had nine students registered, and five or six showed up. Yay! (These seminars are designed to enable freshmen to engage with all sorts of extra material, learn to take part in wide ranging discussions with their peers and a professor or two in a non-confrontational environment, and enrich their first year -some titles (more here): “You Can’t Go Home Again: Now What?”, “Bioterrorism and Emerging Diseases: Their Impact on Society”, “Beer and Belly Rings: Facts and Fictions About Today”s Youth”, “The Art of the Comic Book: Graphic Narratives from Maus to Sin City” (Blast! Why can’t I do that one?!)- are capped at 18 students in order to maintain intimacy of the discussions and discourse, etc….. lovely idea).

Then we handed out the syllabus. The word “science” was spotted. Faces fell. We Click to continue reading this post →

Very Superstitious, Ladders ’bout To Fall

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Apparently, we are hard-wired for superstition and religion. This is according to Bruce Hood, of Bristol University, in the UK. I learned this from an article in the Guardian by James Randerson, which you can read here. The good professor:

suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force.

He goes on to say (in a speech at the British Association Festival of Science in Norwich, or, more probably the press conference after his session):

“I think it is pointless to think that we can get people to abandon their belief systems because they are operating at such a fundamental level,” …. “No amount of rational evidence is going to be taken on board to get people to abandon those ideas.”

And what is being called “irrational”, by the way? Another quote:

But almost everyone entertains some form of irrational beliefs even if they are not religious.

“For example, many people would be reluctant to part with a wedding ring for an identical ring because of the personal significance it holds.

I’m sorry, but I don’t see why that is irrational. Since when is preferring objects of emotional significance actually irrational? All this seems to do is reinforce for the reader the stereotype that scientists regard emotions as “illogical”. This is of course utter crap, if you’ll pardon my French.

“No amount of rational evidence…” Really? I actually have found that there are a lot of things that people are willing to abandon as “irrational beliefs” if you take the time to Click to continue reading this post →

The Cosmic Hunters

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nasa's hubbleThe BBC’s Radio 4 starts a new programme about astronomy tonight. Called “The Cosmic Hunters”, it sounds as though it will be rather good, so do tune in. It will be on Wednesdays at 9:00pm. It will be discussing various areas of recent research, using some of the optical telescopes that we’ve come to know and love (like the Hubble) and will also talk about future telescopes, such as the Webb.

There’s a little article written by the presenter, Chris Riley, here. It is as a sort of preview of the radio show in which he talks about the search for extrasolar planets and the hunt for the oldest galaxies, among other things. Of course, if you don’t get a chance to hear the broadcast, you can always go to the programme’s website to hear archived programs (for a short period).

-cvj

I Can Retire Now…

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kc cole and cv johnson … since on Friday, our event of Thursday night, along with a photo of KC and myself in action, made the front page …of the campus newspaper, the Daily Trojan! This is a big deal, you see. Front page spots for faculty in the student newspaper…. and colour photos to boot. Such treatment is for the football team almost exclusively, I was led to believe.

Story, by Laura Simurda, is here.

Photo by Joseph Zuniga of the DT. (Heh… if you look closely you can see that I forgot to take off my cycle-clips. I wear them all the time as it is the best place to keep them, when on campus…. also, think of it as a sort of silent protest against excessive car use.)

-cvj

(Thanks Krzysztof)

Not the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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How to pass a few minutes outside on a very hot day? Do a demo in front of 90 students when you’re not sure of your equipment, of course! This was in the cause of demontrating Newton’s Laws of Motion in my Physics 100 class today. I’m actually moving backwards at a good speed in this shot.

jet propel 3

jet propel 2jet propel 1Fun was had by all, and I got my first job-related injury from not realizing that the metal nozzle spins around and whacks your trigger hand hard if you don’t hold it…. Would have got better acceleration if I’d pointed it straight forward, but my hand was now injured a bit at that point, so I did what I could…. All’s well that ends well!

-cvj

(Thanks for taking the pictures, Tameem.)