A Sign of the End of Days

I saw in an e-mail that Oxford has given blanket approval for vivas (i.e., thesis defenses) by video conference.

Now we know that we've reached the end of days.

(That said, they were faster than UCLA for blanket approval.)

A Skirt Made of Rejection Letters

“I just searched for ‘unfortunately’ and ‘we regret to inform you’ in my email.”

Michigan State PhD student made a skirt using rejection letters she received through the course of her doctoral program while defending her dissertation last week.https://t.co/KeziG3GcJc

— hardmaru 😷 (@hardmaru) October 16, 2019

(Tip of the cap to Petter Holme.)

Congratulations to Dr. Charlie Marshak!

Congratulations to my UCLA Ph.D. student, Charlie Marshak, for successfully passing his thesis defense on Friday the 13th and for making the final changes and submitting his thesis (Applications of Network Science to Criminal Networks, University Education, and Ecology), which we then approved.

I became one of Charlie's supervisors last fall to help out his main official supervisor Andrea Bertozzi. Of course, although she doesn't get official credit for it (because she's a postdoc and isn't in the official listing), Puck Rombach has been Charlie's main supervisor in practice.

Somerville Mathematics Undergraduate Brigitte Stenhouse Wins Dissertation Prize!

Somerville mathematics undergraduate student Brigitte Stenhouse (who just graduated this year) won a Gibbs dissertation prize for her thesis on Mary Somerville! This is a best-thesis prize for Oxford's 4th-year mathematics and statistics (and sometimes computer science) students.

Today Somerville College posted a press release about Brigitte's prize along with a short interview of Brigitte, who plans to get a Ph.D. in the history of mathematics but is first working for a year in Somerville's development office. Here is my favorite quote of Brigitte's from the interview: It made me question why we value the mathematics we do, why we learn the mathematics we do in school and university, and why it is all named after Cauchy.

The Entropy Zoo

I am going through the draft of a chapter that includes a survey of similarity measures (and I'll need to see if an appropriate survey exists, as we should use this material to help write one if it doesn't), and the appearance of information-theoretic measures naturally made me think of the Entropy Zoo, which I saw yesterday on the Quantum Frontiers blog.

(Who's down with en-tro-py?!?)

RIP John Nash (1928–2015)

Mathematician John Nash and his wife were killed yesterday in a taxi accident.

Nash won the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for the work in his 27-page PhD thesis that invented the theory of non-cooperative games. Not bad. (As Joe Jewell pointed out, Nash's thesis also only has 2 references.)

Nash had recently accepted his Abel Prize (the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize) for entirely different work.

Sylvia Nasar's 1994 article about John Nash, which is based on her book, is a fascinating read. Nasar's book formed the basis for the movie A Beautiful Mind.

Nash is also one of the people who invented the game Hex.

If you want to read more about Nash, go to FAQ maintained by Princeton University.

(Tip of the cap to numerous people, and thanks to Carlos Castillo Chávez for posting the article by Sylvia Nasar.)

Update (5/26/15): As I suspected, this was the final leg of their journey home after Nash was in Norway to receive his Abel Prize.

Update (5/29/15): Here is an article in the popular press about Nash's work on isometric embeddings.

The Length of Doctoral Dissertations

One person compiled some statistics about the mean length of doctoral dissertations in various fields.

Just to give some context, let me point out the following: Version 1 of my PhD thesis was over 400 pages. Version 2 was about 178 pages. (Also, Version 2 was much better than Version 1.)

And, to better appreciate this length (which I would prefer to call "volume"), take a look at where mathematics lands on the chart at the other end of the link.

(Tip of the cap to Ernie Barreto.)

Story: The Rabbit's Dissertation

Today I am going to tell you the story of The Rabbit's Dissertation, which was told to me tonight by political scientist Zeev Maoz.

A rabbit was busy typing up its dissertation when a fox came by to ask it about its thesis topic. The rabbit answered that it was typing a dissertation about "How Rabbits Eat Foxes". The fox---a very skeptical canine---said that surely that the rabbit was wrong and had gotten things in reverse. Surely foxes eat rabbits and not the other way around.

So the rabbit said that it would take the fox over to its cage and the fox should wait there so that the rabbit could come back that night and demonstrate that its dissertation was correct.

A wolf came by later, and the same thing occurred. Then a bear came by and the rabbit took the bear over to its home cage, and then the rabbit locked the door on all three and went away.

The rabbit worked on its dissertation some more and came back the next morning. It opened the door, and it walked through the bones of the fox and the bones of the wolf and the bones of the bear. In the back of the cage was a lion.

Moral: It doesn't matter what your dissertation topic is, but it matters a great deal who your thesis advisor is!

(I had never heard this one before, but Zeev gave me permission to steal it. I don't think the way I told the story did his telling justice. Best. Story. Ever.)

The Proverbial Thesis Committee

I love this issue of PhD Comics showing a stereotypical PhD thesis committee.

I'm not actually any one of these stereotypes, and I read every word of all theses I examine.

I hope to grow up to be a guru someday, though. Mmmmm... cookies.

(Tip of the cap to Mariano Beguerisse Díaz.)

A Geometry Theorem and Interpretative Dance

Here is an excellent entry for the 'Dance Your PhD' contest that illustrates a new theorem from geometry.

(Tip of the cap to Kreso Josic. [Note: Kreso has accents in his name, but I don't feel like looking up the html codes for them today.])

The Other Side of Thesis Exams ("Vivas")

And by the "Other Side," I really mean "The Dark Side."

Anyway, today I was an Internal Examiner in a defense of a doctoral thesis. This was my first time on this side of the table, and I have apparently perfected my scowl so that the student doesn't know what I am thinking about his answer (or thinks that I am thinking the worst). Though I wasn't doing that on purpose --- it's just the way I look when I'm really concentrating on something.

I needed to dress up in full academic regalia (white tie, gown, weird scarf thingy whose name I can't remember, and hat), though thankfully I didn't need to keep my hat on during the exam. Because of my hair's current length, it wouldn't stay on anyway and somehow the one that was "fitted" for me is too large for my head (though given more time in Oxford I fully expect the size of my head to expand accordingly).

The topic of the dissertation concerned complex networks and the relevant subtopics allowed me to bring up a lot of the usual suspects -- including generating functions (my fondness for which dates all the way back to my junior year... just ask the people who took my probability course what they think about generating functions!), modularity, a dig on a certain professor in the networks business who is a bit of an easy target, and so on. (It was also relevant to bring up interesting things like contact matrices.)

The Exam took 3 hours. The student passed and now just needs to correct some stuff on his thesis and he'll be done with this business. I didn't try to make things painful, but then when the student came back in, the External Examiner and I were apparently less clear than I thought about explaining that we only wanted "Minor Corrections" so the student was apparently worried for about 10 minutes that he'd have to defend again. (Oops! Sorry about that!)