A few items of various kinds:
- A little while ago I did another podcast, this time with Hrvoje Kukina. The result is now available here.
- There’s a new French documentary out, available here, about the story of the campaign by a committee of mathematicians in the 1970s to get the Ukrainian mathematician Leonid Pliouchtch out of hands of the KGB. It’s directed by Matthieu Schwartz, whose great-uncle was Laurent Schwartz, one of the main figures in this story (see here). Another member of the committee, Michel Broué, also appears in the film.
One of the issues discussed in the film is how mathematicians could have pulled this off, and whether the devotion of mathematicians to rigorous truth makes them more likely to take a stand on principle on an issue like this (Cédric Villani is interviewed, and takes the position that mathematicians aren’t much different than others). Another aspect of this story is that it may have been influential by making more people on the French left aware of the true nature of the Soviet system, making cooperation between different leftist parties more possible. For more about this aspect of the film, there’s a debate here.
- Source Code is a new book just out, an autobiography of Bill Gates, dealing with his early years, up to the time Microsoft moved to Seattle in early 1979. An important theme of the book is the importance to Gates of mathematics during those early years:
Realizing early on that I had a head for math was a critical step in my story. In his terrific book How Not to Be Wrong, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg observes that “knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.” Those X-ray specs helped me identify the order underlying the chaos, and reinforced my sense that the correct answer was always out there–I just needed to find it. That insight came at one of the most formative times of a kid’s life, when the brain is transforming into a more specialized and efficient tool. Facility with numbers gave me confidence, and even a sense of security.
There’s quite a lot about his years as a student at Harvard, especially about the freshman-year Math 55 class he took, which was taught by John Mather. This brought back a lot of memories for me of my experiences there a couple years later. Gates arrived as a freshman in the fall of 1973, which was two years before me. Something we had in common was not being the best students in Math 55, but somewhere in the middle. Our reactions to that however were very different, since Gates was extremely competitive:
In our Math 55 study sessions, even as we were helping each other, we were also subtly keeping score. That was true in our broader circle of math nerds as well. Everyone knew how everyone else was doing, for instance, that Lloyd in Wigg B aced a Math 21a test or that Peter–or was it someone else?–found an error in Mather’s notes. We all grasped who among us was quicker that day, sharper, the person who “got it” first and then could lead the rest of us to the answer. Every day you strived to be on top. By the end of the first semester, I realized that my ranking in the hierarchy wasn’t what I had hoped…
By most measures I was doing well. I earned a B+ in the first semester which was an achievement in that class. In my stark view however it was less of a measure of what I knew than how much I didn’t. The gap between B+ and A was the difference between being the top person in the class and being a fake…
I was recognizing that while I had an excellent math brain, I didn’t have the gift of insight that sets apart the best mathematicians. I had talent but not the ability to make fundamental discoveries.
In the book, Gates then explains how he ended up concentrating most of effort on computer-related projects and describes those in detail. Other sources say he took the graduate course Math 250a from John Tate the spring semester of his sophomore year, but he doesn’t mention that. By that time he mostly wasn’t attending classes, getting by on cramming for finals, while spending all his time writing a BASIC compiler with Paul Allen, then heading out to Albuquerque to start Microsoft. The semester I arrived at Harvard (fall 1975) he was technically a student, but spending most of his time working for Microsoft, finally leaving Harvard halfway through his junior year.
- The KITP in Santa Barbara is now running a “What is Particle Theory?” program, talks here. Among the talks, one I can recommend is Simon Catterall’s Sneaking up on lattice chiral fermions, especially for its focus on what are called Kahler-Dirac fermions.
