What Happens in Limerick Stays in Limerick

I'll be flying to Limerick tonight for a grant meeting tomorrow. In honor of my trip, I present the following:

There once was an Oxford professor.
Who wasn't much of a confessor.
When his rigor was pondered.
He said his mind wandered.
But at least he was a possessor.


(I think the last line could be better, but I didn't exactly spend a long time on this.)

Update: "Assessor" would also work (and give a slightly different flavor) instead of "confessor".

Human, Meet Nonlinear Oscillator. Nonlinear Oscillator, Meet Human.

Yes, really. The title of the paper was a bit odd (because of the stress on "social" interactions via the 'human dynamic clamp'), but this idea looks very cool!

A Very Short Paper Title

Wow, now that is a very short paper title: 'Q', just 'Q' --- which represents 1 divided by the attenuation factor (not modularity and also not Q).

Sociologist Jim Moody once submitted a paper called "Titles" to a journal. He was trying to get a one-word title, but that didn't fly with the journal, so he switched the title to something very long. (I e-mailed Jim to ask him for a link, which I will provide once I have it.)

The shortest title (in terms of number of words) that I have used in a paper is two. That occurs in http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/porterm/papers/multilayer_review-published.pdf this paper. It broke my previous record of 3 words. Now I need to try to write a paper with a one-world title. I don't think I'll ever get down to one letter.

Update: Jim sent me a .pdf of his paper. It turns out that the story I heard about the title being hugely long isn't true. Rather, his paper is called "Trends in Sociology Titles", which is accurate but doesn't have the same effect as going overboard.

Back in the Day: Spring 2001 Penn State/Maryland Dynamical Systems Conference

The recent announcement of the Fields Medals brought me to thinking back at the 2001 Spring Maryland-Penn State dynamical systems conference.

In addition to the schedule --- which included somebody who already had won the Fields medal, who I successfully challenged with one of my questions even though I was just a grad student; somebody else who would win one later; and several other speakers who I met for the first time at that conference and would see many times since over the years --- there were also other people (like Howie Weiss) in the audience with whom I would subsequently interact a lot over the years. This also includes several people from University of Maryland (such as Brian Hunt, who was one of the conference's main organizers), though I am pretty sure that Jim Yorke wasn't around for that conference. (I would meet him many times later.) One of my friends from Caltech also attended the conference, and several audience members who weren't speakers also have moved on to bigger and better mathematical things.

I also vaguely remember that audience-member Misha Brin (who was not yet known as "Sergey's father" at the time) was not particularly fond of the research that I presented in my talk, though I'm not really sure whether that was just his mannerisms or his actual opinion.

Several of the attendees who were still doing rather pure work then are now rather applied in most of their work. (Or have even become famous entrepreneurs in the tech world. :) ) Given what people have done since that conference, it's a rather impressive selection of speakers among the people who hadn't yet "made it" at the time.

Gorgeous Mathematical Sculptures

Eric Standley's mathematical sculptures are absolutely gorgeous.

(Tip of the cap to The National Museum of Mathematics.)

Vacation: Graduate School Style

This issue of PhD Comics about vacations in graduate school is pretty much true.

(Tip of the cap to Carlos Castillo Chavez.)

Nope, None of Them Here

I overheard the following comment in the dining hall at Churchill College, Cambridge by one the kitchen staff: "I hate really smart people who think they're above everybody else."

We don't have any such people at Oxford, of course. :)

Note: There was no comma in what she said (so it wasn't "people, who").

My 'Personal Vision'

I am giving some comments on an EU consultation for how mathematics can help with challenges in big data and high-performance computing. The sign-up section contains a long field called "Personal Vision" where we are apparently supposed to stand on our soapbox and give our grant vision. I just wrote the following:

"I like to study interesting problems."

I hope they consider that to be sufficient.

2014 Fields Medals

The 2014 Fields Medals have now been awarded. The Fields Medals are considered the most prestigious award in mathematics, though the Abel Prize is giving the Fields Medal a run for its money.

The 2014 Fields Medalists are Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava, Martin Hairer, and Maryam Mirzakhani. Avila won for his work on dynamical systems and renormalization, so there's a victory for the home team. (Dynamical systems is part of the home team because it's one of my research subjects.) Bhargava won for his work on the geometry of numbers. Hairer won for his work on stochastic partial differential equations, and his joint work with Jonathan Mattingly was included in his prize citation. (Now I need to go give Mattingly crap for this --- just because it's fun to give him crap. I could focus on the "too old" part, though of course just about all of us in mathematics would be happy to get a sidebar mention for something like this!) His work is also in an area that has some relation to some of my interests. Mirzakhani got a Fields Medal for her work on dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, and she is the first woman ever to win the Fields Medal. (About damn time. Surely there are others who could have been so recognized previously?) Dynamical systems --- including billiard systems, which I like a great deal --- play a significant role in some of her recognized work as well, so dynamical systems in its various guises and places where it makes an impact --- and it is a rather diverse field indeed --- has done rather well this year. (Statistical mechanics, which is also near and dear to my heart and which is also rather diverse, did exceptionally well in the 2010 Fields Medals, and it also reared its head among the 2006 winners.)

Update (8/14/14): My department head Sam Howison has written an opinion piece in The Guardian on women in mathematics and Maryam Mirzakhani's Fields Medal.

RIP Robin Williams (1951–2014)

Comedy legend Robin Williams was found dead earlier today (the 11th) from an apparent suicide. I'm not sure what my favorite one of his roles is, but he certainly had some memorable ones (such as Mork and in movies like Good Morning Vietnam and Dead Poets Society).

(Tip of the cap to several people via their Facebook posts.)

Update: The CNN article about Williams' death has some additional information.

What Happens in Cambridge (UK) Stays in Cambridge (UK) [2014 Edition]

I only got back from Caltech yesterday evening, and today I am taking a train to Cambridge for the 2014 SIAM Conference on Nonlinear Waves and Coherent Structures.

I have prepared a very topical slide for my talk. Be prepared. :)

It's a Meme: #HunterPenceSigns

The #HunterPenceSigns meme is pretty damn awesome. Sometimes it's bizarre what becomes a "thing", and this meme is officially a "thing". (Oh, and as you can see from the article to which I linked, Hunter Pence is handling the gentle trolling really well.)

Update (8/07/14): Here are some more Hunter Pence signs.

"Longdaysin"

I just learned (in a talk by Frank Doyle) about an appropriately-named compound called "longdaysin" because of its ability to slow down biological clocks. Even cooler than "ubiquitin". Those wacky biologists...

The Best Thesis Defense is a Good Thesis Offense!

YES!!!!!!!!

(Do you know who said that? Mel, the cook on Alice.)

And, yes, today's xkcd is a huge win.

Baseball Cup Art

Yup, the Baseball cup-art war has just been taken to a brand new level. First it was the Rockies spelling "Rox", then it was the Cubs spelling "Cubs", and now a minor league pitcher has given us a seen from Pac-Man. I approve!

Achievement Unlocked: Use the Fibonacci Sequence to Verify ID to Complete a Purchase

Achievement Unlocked: Use the Fibonacci sequence instead of an ID card to verify my identity and complete a purchase.

This evening, I found a nice practical real-world application of the Fibonacci sequence: I was buying a game (called "Pix") at Game Empire and was paying by credit card. The guy behind the counter asked to see an ID card, but I didn't have any with me. After I mentioned that the only thing I could do was to go back to my hotel room to get an ID, he decided that if I could correctly define the Fibonacci sequence that that would suffice instead of an ID card. So I gave him the correct definition, and we finished up the purchase.

(His idea came from the fact that I was using a Caltech Credit Union credit card. He wanted to make sure that card was legitimately mine. OK, I now have a nice story to tell --- which I appreciate --- but the logic was somewhat flawed. I did tell the guy that we both get an "Achievement Unlocked" for this.)

So don't ever let anyone tell you that there aren't any practical applications for the Fibonacci sequence!

Update: As Ernie Barreto points out, doing a Taylor-series approximation correctly was once a matter of life-or-death for physicist Igor Tamm. I am going to use that story when I teach Taylor series to my students.

Love, Three-Body Problems, and Chaos

Well, mathematicians certainly like to discuss love and its chaotic implications. (Remember, the three-body problem is provably chaotic.)

Post-Seminar Comments

After our applied math seminars, we have coffee and cookies (and other pastries, or "cakes" as they are known in the UK) in the common room.

Earlier this year, after a particularly frustrating seminar, one of my colleagues uttered the memorable line "I'm going to have a fucking cookie. I earned it." (We all earned it. It was awful.)

But the best (and most memorable) post-seminar piece of snark that I have ever heard occurred during my postdoc years at Caltech and came from the mouth of Catalin Turc: "His theory is retarded."

What Happens at Caltech Stays at Caltech

You want an awesome ‪#‎tbt ('Throwback Thursday')‬? OK, I'll give you an awesome #tbt!

Tomorrow, I am flying out to Pasadena to attend a reunion/workshop for the 20th anniversary of the CDS* department at Caltech!

And I have even packed my faded 20-year old Lloyd shirt that I got ... [all together now] ... when I was frosh at Caltech in Fall 1994.

* Control and Dynamical Systems (not TFM)

Origin of Mysterious World Trade Center Ship

I missed this story previously, but the remains of an old ship was unearthed under the collapsed World Trade Center in 2010, and now scientists believe that they know the origin of this ship. It seems to have been built from trees that were felled in Pennsylvania in 1773. Very cool!

Also, I love the description of the scientific article that reported the discovery as "probably the most attention grabbing story ever published in Tree-Ring Research".