Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, recently introduced a bill to eliminate the diversity visa program, which awards 55,000 green cards by lottery, and instead redirects all of those green cards to skilled advanced foreign graduates from U.S. universities. His bill came up for a vote last week, failing in the House.

By Alex Nowrasteh | National Journal

As a counter, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who represents part of  Silicon Valley, introduced their own legislation to increase the number of green cards for highly skilled graduates without destroying the diversity visa program. It’s a version of Smith’s bill meant to appeal to Democrats who support the diversity visa, but it will turn off Republicans who are newly opposed to it.

Both bills, introduced with provisions unacceptable to the other party, make for political theater but leave the fundamental problem of immigration reform unresolved.

On Oct. 1, new highly skilled migrant workers on H-1B visas can start working in the United States. H-1B visas are a small subset of visas that let U.S. firms temporarily hire skilled foreigners. Along withskilled foreigners on green cards, H-1Bs make a big difference in innovative growth industries, even though only 85,000 a year are hired annually. About half of all H-1Bs work in the computer industry, with most of the rest in engineering, science, mathematics, and technology.

Over the last decade, the number of jobs in these sectors has grown three times faster than in the rest of the economy. Foreigners seem particularly driven to these high-growth industries. About 35 percent of engineers, 27 percent of computer scientists and mathematicians, and 25 percent of physical scientists were born in foreign countries.

To be clear, Americans are driven to these industries, too. U.S. firms try to hire H-1Bs and skilled immigrants when they are expanding. Smaller technology firms that employ H-1Bs hire five to seven other employees for each H-1B worker brought in. H-1B workers expand production, meaning that firms have to hire other Americans as well to work alongside H-1Bs. That is one reason why more technology workers do not drive down American wages.

Every year, firms in Silicon Valley and elsewhere clamber for more H-1B visas than are issued. This year, after just two months of accepting H-1B visas, the government had to stop because the quota had been reached. Last decade, when the economy was growing at a rapid clip, the yearly quota would fill up in a single day.

President Obama’s stimulus program restricted bailed-out financial firms from hiring H-1B workers.

Firms already spend about $6,000 in legal and government fees per H-1B and as much as twice that for employment-sponsored green cards. Obama didn’t think those fees were high enough, so he doubled them for firms heavily dependent on H-1B workers, mostly Indian firms, to fund increased border-security efforts.

Dynamic Silicon Valley firms and the technology industry are highly dependent on skilled workers. As they grow, so does their demand for skilled workers. To continue to expand in this overall moribund economy and remain a bright light of economic success, they need to be freed of obtuse immigration restrictions, quotas and rules that hobble their expansion.

The bills introduced by Schumer, Lofgren, and Smith would release a bit of the pressure. But when desperately needed reform is stalled over the diversity visa, which has nothing to do with skilled immigration and is blamed for many sins it has never committed, it is clear just how unserious Washington is about solving the immigration mess it created.

Alex Nowrasteh is the immigration-policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

I met Dame Kathleen in 1999, when I photographed her on publication of her first book (when she was ‘only’ 86!). We seemed to hit it off and made each other laugh a lot in that photo session She was quite happy to go along with my idea of photographing her painting one of her magic squares on a sheet of glass (that’s why the numbers are reversed). We have kept in touch ever since and during these past few years her remarkable energies have kept her working constantly on her mathematics papers, on her astronomy (when travelling the world with her big motorised telescope to catch transits of Venus, solar eclipses, etc became too much for her she donated her telescope to a local university) and on her music (she was a founder of the Royal Northern College of Music). In between all that, she found time to write her autobiography.

I feel privileged to have known her and wish her a Very Happy 100th Birthday for the 1st October.

One way to build community amoung mathematicians is to construct with students an anchor chart about the question “What does a mathematician do? This can create rich discussions and some possible answers such as:

A mathematician…

• listens to the ideas of other mathematicians
• encourages other mathematicians
• follows directions
• knows what to do in mathematician’s workshop
• takes time to take all the information he (she) has and puts it all together
• uses strategies
• stops and thinks
• writes to remember her (his) thinking
• asks questions
• shares his (her) thinking with other mathematicians
• keeps trying
• shares manipulatives

O’Connell, S. (2005) . Now I get it. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

 Mathematicians and Physicists are curious characters. Sometimes you find them voicing out their opinions in such a way about others, their colleagues and themselves that may be very enjoyable to hear(and read about). 

   Having written enough explanations(for now), I guess a bit of “mathematician and physicists” jokes can be added at this point. So, in this post, there will be no wormholes, no paradox, no “atomos”, just what these people, on whom we all depend immensely, think about stuff. Beware though, after reading this, you may develop an excessive interest in science.

How can you know what experiment is being conducted?

—————–//——————

“Philosophers write so as not to be understood.”Richard Feynman

————-//————–

                                   Why was Heisenberg’s wife unsatisfied?

Little Fact: LA is moving north towards San Fransisco at the same rate as your fingernails are growing!

QED:Quite Easily Done!

An angry human female develops an acceleration of about 100g’ at the foot when stalking off in high heels.

They can’t fire me,SLAVES HAVE TO BE SOLD. (On the wall of a graduate student’s lab)

Before I go on I had better tell you what the theorem says: the action takes place on a square grid (or “lattice”) comprising those points on the plane whose x & y coordinates are both whole numbers. Against this background we can draw all manner of geometrical objects simply by connecting dots with straight lines. Any non-self-intersecting loop built in this way will carve out a shape (known as a “lattice polygon”). Of course, this figure might be horribly jagged and irregular, with thousands of edges. Nevertheless, Pick’s theorem will tell us its area in a single, simple formula. All you need to do is count the number of grid points which lie on the shape’s boundary (call that B) and the number which lie fully inside the shape (C). Then the area is A=½B+C-1.

Here are some observations which I’d say make this a great piece of maths:

1. It is easy to state.
2. It is easy to apply: all you have to do is count dots.
3. It is very general, valid not just for triangles and quadrilaterals but highly irregular shapes too.

And yet…

4. It is by no means obviously true.

Together (1)-(4) add up to…

5. It is genuinely useful: it will very quickly tell you the area of shapes which would be horrible to calculate from first principles.

So far this could be an argument for including Pick’s theorem at GCSE or even primary school level…. but I don’t think that would be a good idea. As we all know, mathematicians deal above all in proofs. So if Pick’s theorem is to be on the syllabus, then its proof had better be too. And I think there is a lot to recommend this as well.

So, before I go further, here’s an rough outline of how a typical proof goes (see my slides for a more detailed sketch, or Cut the Knot for an alternative approach). First step: establish that the result holds for triangles. Second: prove (by induction) that every lattice polygon can be constructed by gluing triangles together. Third and final step: show that when you glue two shapes together, if PT holds for each separately, then it holds for the amalgam. Here are some remarks in praise of this proof:

1. It is a good level of difficulty. It is certainly not trivial, at the same time there are no major technical obstacles to overcome.
2. Taken as a whole, the proof is reasonably lengthy – I’d argue this is a good thing, as there is real satisfaction in proving something meaty, rigorously and from first principles. At the same time, the summary is short, and the overarching strategy fairly easy to grasp.
3. What’s more, it comes naturally in three pieces, each of which is of a manageable size, any one of which could make a reasonable bookwork-type exam question.
4. It is a good illustration of an important philosophy: to address a complicated problem (an arbitrary irregular shape) we break it down into simpler things we know how to deal with (triangles).

Here are a couple of other miscellaneous things in PT’s favour:

1. It is a comparatively recent discovery. With much of school-level geometry dating back to Euclid, Pick’s theorem (proved in 1899) would be the most modern thing on the maths A-level syllabus. (I’m open to correction here!)
2. It is always good to place science in its human context, and PT offers several possibilities for worthwhile cross-disciplinary research. Georg Pick was an Austrian Jew who lived most of his life in Prague, and was eventually murdered by the Nazis. He was also a friend of Albert Einstein, and played an interesting indirect role in the development of General Relativity.

Back with the maths, PT naturally opens up several further lines of enquiries – these are outlined in more detail in my slides. I don’t suggest these should be on the syllabus, but their proximity is certainly a bonus, and they would make excellent topics for project-work or extracurricular reading:

1. What happens if we make the grid finer? If we make it fine enough, can any shape with straight edges be turned into a lattice polygon? (No! This leads to topics like constructible numbers, squaring the circle, and transcendental numbers.)
2. Does PT generalise to shapes with holes in? (Yes! This leads directly into discussion of topics like simple-connectedness and Euler characteristic.)
3. Does it generalise to 3-dimensions? (No! Or not immediately, anyway. The basic counterexamples are Reeve tetrahedra, which can be grasped without too much difficulty. It is illuminating how these shapes eliminate the possibility of any version of Pick’s theorem in 3d: the basic idea being that two Reeve tetrahedra can have the same number of boundary and internal points, but different volumes.)
4. Beyond this, the more enthusiastic student can delve as deeply as they fancy into the beautiful theory of Ehrhart polynomials, which will lead them to further elegant theorems and very quickly to open problems. This is great for showing that maths is not all finished, and might perhaps inspire them to have a go at tackling these questions themselves.

So the topic is poetry, but what, you may ask, are the open seas? And why have I called upon a storm god and his trident instead of, say, a wood sprite or a house elf? Well, the open seas are “the market”, or what’s referred to in the corporate world as Sales and Marketing, a.k.a., S&M. Any resemblance to another acronym involving gags and whips is coincidence, I’m sure. And while I have the utmost regard for individuals who work in the field, and believe strongly that everyone ought to develop persuasive and promotional skills, Sales and Marketing, as a whole, when it comes to poetry, has the wherewithal and vision of a cracked brick at the bottom of a landfill.

Let’s, for the sake of simplicity, narrow this discussion down to booksellers and even more, to their online division. Now, let’s say you’re looking for a powerful, quick heart tumble—remember that feeling when you first saw Titanic, the movie, and heard Celine sing the theme song, before we went all macho and made fun of her? Like that, only shorter. You have three minutes with your BlackBerry before the airport limousine arrives. You would happily pay to download the literary equivalent of an iTune.

Search by genre, and you’ll find a menu that reads as follows: Art, Biography, Business, Chick Lit, Children’s, Christian, Classics, Comics, Contemporary, Cookbooks, Crime, Erotica, Fantasy, Fiction, Gay & Lesbian, Graphic Novels, History, Horror, Humour, Memoir, Music, Mystery, Non-Fiction, Paranormal, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, Religion, Romance, Science, Science Fiction, Self Help, Suspense, Spirituality, Sports, Thriller, Travel, Young Adults. Oops, your three minutes are up. Limo’s here!

Now let’s slo-mo that sequence. Did you notice poetry was in the list? Maybe, maybe not. And if you had remembered (or been told by someone) that poems deliver quick emotional punches, they can be read and enjoyed over and over, and that it had been aeons since you enjoyed a genuine poetic experience—thank you, market, for throwing your cold wet blanket over one of man’s greatest crafts!— how helpful would your search through Poetry be?

Well, I logged onto the world’s biggest online seller, and the first book of poetry on their list is: Six Centuries of English Poetry: Tennyson to Chaucer (1892). Geez, I want a poem, booksellers, not an English Lit degree! You wouldn’t log onto Business and find The Code of Hammurabi as their lead title or Jules Verne at the top of Science Fiction. What are they missing, these booksellers?

For one things, I’d say, poems have been—and are being written—in every one of the genres listed above. Poetry is tailor-made to handle any theme with as much, if not more, deftness and poignancy than its heavy-footed cousin, prose. Readers with hand-held devices and no time are tailor-made for poetry and the med-free exhilaration they deliver, but hardly anyone in “the market” knows how to get that across–and make a profit, which I am entirely in favour of. So poems and their creators die on the vine; they die of broken hearts, unread.

Most of the poets we know and love today—Blake, Shelley, Pound, Whitman—self-published their work with all the shame, risk and low return the 21^st century associates with that experience. Many became famous posthumously—now doesn’t that suck!—and the royalties they would and should have earned pour into publishers’ coffers instead.

The good news for poets, readers and publishers is, that we live in an era of great change and technological potential. And I am happy to state with unequivocal, first-hand knowledge that the love of poetry has never gone away—that it may even be on the rise. As evidence, I offer here The Mexican Saga: A Poetic Journey Through the 20-Count, published by the courageous, open-hearted Greyheart Press in the UK.

In my next blog, I will pay tribute to a living, published poet, Gavriel Navarro, who lobbed me on the head with a tuberose 22 months ago, and whose work delivers that emotional punch so many of us are looking for. Please stay tuned for “Whitman Would Have Loved Navarro”, Part II of my trident blog.

Meanwhile, here’s a free bit of poetic fun for the mathematically inclined:

A Differential Love Story

Two mathematicians met

on the slope field of

a complex plane to

resolve a bifurcation in

their relationship.

∞

Our oscillation has come

to rest, said he. Why?

∞

I don’t know, said she.

Everything was fine until

you brought in the periodically

forced and undamped mass

spring systems.

∞

But I thought you liked

beating modes—small

oscillations to large.

∞

I did, at first, but I had not

factored in the damping

constant.

∞

Meaning?

∞

I think you know what I mean.

∞

A shudder ran through his

theorem of existence and

uniqueness. I see. Air

resistance or fluid?

∞

Both. He is a poet.

∞

A poet. Does this mean,

if you will allow me to

iterate, separatrix?

∞

I’m afraid so, but don’t feel

bad. He does, I admit, have an

infinite string that tells me how

my orbit journeys, but our

equilibrium may be source.

∞

His birfurcation pitchforked.

So you’re saying, over time,

that we could sink again?

∞

Of course, my dear.

Resonance is forever.

∞

© Elaine Stirling, 2012

Excerpt from “The Mathematics of Perfect Shuffles”

If you are good in Math, you might learn ways on how to cheat in card games just like what happened to Ben Campbell (as shown in the Movie “21“). Another good proof of this is how to do the perfect shuffles.

One of the earliest references for the perfect shuffles is the 1843 book titled “An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling.” The author, J.H. Green, described this method in a game of Faro.In 1919, the trick was also introduced by C.T. Jordan to magicians in his book titled “Thirty  Card  Mysteries.” Then on, the perfect shuffles has been popularly used not only in the card game of Faro but as well as in Poker and Rummy.

As it became much popular, the perfect shuffles caught the eyes not only of gamblers and magicians but Mathematicians and the like. The explanations on the technique became more detailed as in 1983 paper by Diaconis et al. titled “The  Mathematics  of  Perfect  Shuffles.”  Thus, you can now learn the perfect shuffles cheat if you do the Math!

Referrence:

Draconis, et al. A paper titled “The  Mathematics  of  Perfect  Shuffles.”  Stanford  University, California. 1983.

challenges.hothousedevelopments.com >>>at<<< mail.opal-solutions.com,

whether this is of interest.

Presented by Marcus du Sautoy, the 44-part series is aimed to introduce you to a range of mathematical topics in an approachable style, and is aimed at young and old alike – in fact the only requirement for enjoying these books is a curious mind and a thirst for understanding. The series approaches the subject of mathematics in a completely new, fresh and reader-friendly way, and covers a range of topics such as: the Golden Ratio, Prime Numbers, the Fourth Dimension, Fermat’s Enigma, the Secrets of Pi and Chaos Theory.

We’ve also built a website that goes along with the series that will feature news, videos and puzzles from the world of maths, as well as stories about maths innovators and heroes. We’ll be updating this every week, so please check it out.

We will be setting a weekly video maths challenge, the first of which is presented by Marcus du Sautoy, and will post the solution a week later. Visitors to the website will be able to enter a competition every week.

The first challenge video can be found here.

We were wondering if you would like to review the series for us, and we’d like to offer some copies of some books from the series to give away as a competition prize on your site or blog? We would love it if you wrote about the books and the site, as well as checking out the challenges and solutions on the website.

It would be great to hear your thoughts on the site and series, so please drop me a note and let me know what you think.

Tony Gardiner said:

The best mathematicians – from Poincare to Thurston – are sometimes surprisingly sensitive to, and sensible about, educational issues.

The sad news is that Bill Thurston has just died.

He got his hands dirty with mathematics education from at least 1980, and wrote several articles which are quite inspiring.  Here is one that is easily to hand for some more refreshing reading than the stuff I usually highlight!

Bill Thurston died on 21 August 2012. Obituaries: The Mathematical Legacy of William Thurston (1946-2012) and Bill Thurston (October 30, 1946 – August 21, 2012)

Still life is the most philosophical genre of traditional figurative  painting. It saw some of its most famous manifestations in the Flemish tradition of the XVII century, but it evolved and survived as a meaningful presence through much of XX century art, adopted by avantarde movements such as cubism and dadaism.

The purpose of this essay is to dig into the philosophical meaning behind the still life painting and show how this genre can be regarded as a sophisticated method to present in a pictorial and immediately accessible visual way, reflections upon the evolving notions of space and time, which played a fundamental role in the parallel cultural developments of Western European mathematical and scientic thought, from the XVII century, up to the
present time.

A challenge for the artists of today becomes then how to continue this tradition. Is the theme of still life, as it matured and evolved throughout the dramatic developments of XX century art, still a valuable method to represent and reflect upon the notions of spacetime that our current scientic thinking is producing, from the extra dimensions of string theory to the spin foams and spin networks of loop quantum gravity, to noncommutative spaces, or information based emergent gravity? Some may feel that the notions of spacetime contemporary physics and mathematics are dealing with nowadays are too remote from the familiar everyday objects that form the basic jargon of still life paintings. However, much the same could be said about the notions of relativistic spacetime and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics that were trickling down to the collective imagination
in the early XX century, and yet the artists of the avant-garde movements of the time were ready to jump onto concepts such as non-euclidean geometry, higher dimensions, and the like, and bring them into contact with a drastic revision of what it means to “represent” the everyday objects that surround us, and that come to occupy a profoundly altered concept of space and time. So, I believe, the challenge is a valid one, even in the light of the ever more complex landscape of today’s thinking about the concepts of space and time, and I take the occasion to make an open call here to the practicing artists, to take up the challenge and paint a new chapter of the “still life” genre, suitable for the minds of the current century.

Read the full paper.

Thurston embraced efforts to make mathematics more accessible and enjoyable for students and the general public, especially in later years. In a 1994 article for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, he wrote that the fundamental question for mathematicians should not be, “How do mathematicians prove theorems?” but, “How do mathematicians advance human understanding of mathematics?” He believed that this human understanding was what gave mathematics not only its utility but its beauty, and that mathematicians needed to improve their ability to communicate mathematical ideas rather than just the details of formal proofs.

He worked on projects to increase public understanding of mathematics and saw the mathematical sides of art and design. He co-developed a course called “Geometry and the Imagination” designed to introduce deep geometric concepts to people who did not necessarily have an advanced background in math.

The New York Times and The Atlantic published very warm obituaries. Edward Tenner writes in The Atlantic (he starts with a quote from The New York Times):

“Cosmologists have drawn on Dr. Thurston’s discoveries in their search for the shape of the universe.

On a more unlikely note, his musings about the possible shapes of the universe inspired the designer Issey Miyake‘s 2010 ready-to-wear collection, a colorful series of draped and asymmetrical forms. The fashion Web site Style.com reported that after the show, the house’s designer and Dr. Thurston “wrapped themselves for the press in a long stretch of red tubing to make the point that something that looks random is actually (according to Thurston) ‘beautiful geometry.’”

Mathematicians can cite many other examples of surprising applications. Could the 19th-century founders of mathematical logic have imagined where Alan Turing would take their new field a hundred years later? With the computer science that Turing founded, the once-abstract field of number theory became a foundation of cryptography. The mathematics of origami have contributed to designing solar sails and automotive airbags. In the 1980s, the topological subfield of knot theory became a powerful tool in particle physics. Symposia have already been held on applications of topology to the design of industrial robots. I’ve even read the statement — but haven’t been able to find the reference again — that every significant pure math idea has an application. We just haven’t discovered some yet.

All this is timely, because in some quarters of neo-mercantilist, managerial academia, some mathematics is considered too pure for the national economy, especially in the UK.

In a famous paper on the uncanny way that math describes reality, the physicist Eugene Wigner concluded:

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.”

Bill Thurston was one of the great bestowers of that gift.

The following question was asked of mathematicians from around the world:

How do you write 4 in between 5?

Here are the results:

The Chinese wrote, “Is this a joke?”

The Japanese wrote, “Impossible”.

The Americans wrote, “The question is all wrong.”

The British wrote, “It’s not on the Internet.”

.

.

The Israelis wrote:

F(iv)e

Of course we are kind of weird when it comes to pet names since we tend to name our dogs after famous Scientists/Mathematicians.  Our basset hound is named Einstein after all.  And should we ever get another dog after Einstein passes he will probably be named Mobeus.

Both kittens are settling in nicely here at Case de Leitner, and are busy being loved on and exploring.  Horus is taking the lead with the exploring part as he gets used to his new home.  Bast on the other hand likes to curl up with us and lick us.  My 3 y/o has yet to try and strangle the kittens of course they are too fast for her as well.  Captain Jack is slowly learning that he must share his family and house.  When the kittens get a bit older and finally realize that they out number him, Jack will be in loads of trouble.  I will try and post pictures of the twins together tomorrow.

“Olympus was not shaken by winds nor ever wet with rain, nor did snow fall upon it, but the air is outspread clear and cloudless, and over it hovered a radiant whiteness.” Homer, Odyssey.

Today, the equivalent of the 12 Gods on Olympus are, maybe, the G-20, or G-2, or the UN or any of the international organisations that are set-up on our behalf.

Or, maybe it’s closer to home – the national heads who make up the EU or the lesser number that make up the EZ; the 100 Senators in the US Congress.

Or, maybe they are the 1% who own 40% of the earth’s assets (financially-speaking).

Or, how about Forbes Global 2000 – the top 2000 of the world’s companies that, between them, account for $149 trillion in assets and employ 83 million people. This compared to McKinsey’s estimate of $212 trillion value of the world’s capital stock in 2011 – a huge percentage.

Icy Slopes

The Greek Gods took their place after a war with the Titans – who ruled before them. Mythology into reality – our new Gods rule in much the same way after a 20^th Century where totalitarian regimes fought each other, amongst each and against  democratic nations in bloody conflict. Millions died in China, the Soviet Union, Europe, Vietnam, Africa, Indonesia and elsewhere as different theories of government battled for supremacy.

Francis Fukuyama declared it “The End of History” as liberal democracy supposedly triumphed. We know now that he was wrong (as he has himself declared). For, the winner (for now) was not democracy but a form of capitalism that promotes a new set of god-like creatures and a new Olympus where the wind does not blow and the air is clear. This new capitalism – the complete dominance of quantity no matter what type of government is in power – was relatively bloodless in its conquests, but no less callous in its purpose. Indeed, its callousness is worse than before as it is merely the “invisible hand” that drives the marketplace that has led to the victory of the new Gods.

Now, sitting upon the summit, surrounded by the icy slopes that let few into their circle, they can look down upon the rest in their eco-defended enclave.

How the War Was Won

The titanic struggle was won on the back of the primacy of goods – developing the ability for ordinary people to secure their basic material needs and then onwards to “choice” and leisure and luxury. This has been wonderfully accompanied by the ability of business to promote their products so that demand could be developed without the consumer realizing it. This ability to influence demand (so brilliantly described in Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society”) has led to a victory of quantity over quality in the West and will do so elsewhere.

The victory was made easier by Governments’ willingness to adhere to the 19^th Century economic theories that made “growth” and GDP the concepts upon which all governing was placed – but, placed them in simulations which cannot reflect reality. Mathematicians and econometricians have extended the fallacy – we live for numbers. The evidence for this can be seen so well in Russia and China. For most of the 20^th Century, both held out as anti-capitalist bastions as the world moved to strengthen democracy. Neither has succumbed to democracy – Russia is a gangster-elite State, China is a legalist, centralized State. But, both yielded wholeheartedly to the market.

Who Won the War?

Many argue that the democratic West won the war (as Fukuyama attempted to suggest) but this is wrong. The western form of liberal democracy with its desire to provide representative government, elections and low corruption levels (comparatively) as well as supposed access to education and upward social mobility is losing out. It is arguable that even in those countries that still pursue these ends, there is now a vastly worsening separation between rich and poor and a hardening of social structures – with far less mobility.

In China and Russia, elites have won the war and their instruments of war have been capitalist – as their citizens climb up Maslow’s hierarchy of need from the very bottom, quantity of goods is supreme no matter how they are derived. As Jonathan Fenby describes in “Tiger Head, Snake Tails” (http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_10?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=tiger+head+snake+tails&sprefix=tiger+head%2Caps%2C414) this is, in China, despite rampant corruption, ecological degradation and vast differences in wealth between elites as well as complete indifference to the vast population when their houses are demolished to make way for new buildings or motorways (for example).

Who Lost the War?

Millions of lives were lost in the 20^th Century as nations defended themselves against the onslaught of totalitarianism. But, a new totalitarianism has taken root right beneath our noses.

It is the totalitarianism of the elites that control the markets – markets fed by a constant diet of GDP statistics and growth targets.

The losers are (in Orwellian-speak) supposedly the winners – the mass of the population that has grown “wealthier” throughout the latter half of the 20^th Century.

So, it seems to be a benign revolution but the problems are becoming clearer by the day.

In Greece, home to Mount Olympus, the country is in its fifth year of recession. In Spain, 24.6% of people are now officially unemployed. In most countries, the gap between the wealthy and the rest is growing steadily.  Economic strains are now working their way around the system as growth (measured traditionally in 19^th  Century models) stalls outside of newly developing nations (yet, who believes the measures coming from China?). Today’s youth in the developed west are unlikely to be “wealthier” than their parents in pure GDP terms.

But, we should not be focused on pure numbers. Economic growth is also threatening the ecology of the planet at an alarming rate. Whether or not fossil fuels are near their end, the effects on the planet are growing and recent changes to our weather patterns merely the first signs. Our damning footprint is ever more etched on the planet and real risks are emerging that the life styles we live now may not be available for long. As Rumanian economist Georgescu-Roegen surmised over fifty years ago, maybe we can’t change and will simply go out in a puff of smoke.

Maybe, though, society will not, for ever, tolerate the new totalitarians, the new Olympians.

The Gods were not immortal

Of course, nothing lasts forever. The Greek Gods did not survive (except in mythology) and neither will the current ones.

The problem is that we are engrained with the belief that quantity is the key to good life (which it may be up to a point) and have lost a connection with what society is about. Mass production has led to greater wealth but, as Galbraith saw 60 years ago, society cannot be all about quantity.

Maslow, developing his Hierarchy of Need as a marketing tool, expected that we would go beyond quantity to some form of self-actualization. We have definitely not managed that yet but we have some signs that societal self-actualization is possible.

A major problem in the way of this is that different countries are at different stages of economic development. China has a massive population still well down the material scale and there will be no let-up in the leadership’s drive for “growth” to stem the dismay of their people on all other issues. In Africa, the longing for material wealth is as strong and who can blame them bearing in mind the economic and social torment they have suffered?

So, initiatives like Zero Impact Growth being developed by John Elkington and his Volans company are worth considering – see   http://www.deloitte.com/view/nl_NL/nl/diensten/duurzaamheid/5d6a3f37959b8310VgnVCM2000001b56f00aRCRD.htm

This is an approach to growth with zero impact on the planet and ultimately to give back more than is taken out. Where others seek to quantify (and there are dangers in the approach of quantifying everything), the Elkington approach is to develop a maturity matrix as follows:

Maybe there is some fight left and the reality behind the model is clear – we can’t fight the invisible hand but maybe there is a chance for society to develop some self-actualisation behind the corporate drive towards zero impact growth where the planet survives along with humanity.

That doesn’t impact on the gap between the wealthy and the rest as the focus is on economics and sustainability. Inequality is as important a problem as ecology. Numbers should be seen for what they are – where money is one aspect of our lives not the only one. Demos, a UK think-tank has just published: Beyond GDP – New Measures for a New Economy. http://www.demos.org/publication/beyond-gdp-new-measures-new-economy. I

It is an attempt to seek a rationale for economics beyond numbers. Briefly it posits that:

• GDP does not distinguish between spending on bad things and spending on good things.  By this measurement, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico “positively” contributed to the economy just like the many good and services that people actually want or need.

• GDP doesn’t account for the distribution of growth. Our total national income has doubled over thirty years, and so has the share of national income going to the wealthiest households, but average households have seen little or no income gains. GDP doesn’t care if growth is captured by a few or widely shared.

• GDP doesn’t account for depletion of natural capital and ecosystem services.  If all the fish in the sea are caught and sold next year, global GDP would see a big boost while the fishing industry itself would completely collapse.

• GDP doesn’t reflect things that have no market price but are good for our society, like volunteer work, parenting in the home, and public investments in education and research.

Two studies that show on this morning after that wonderful Danny Boyle-inspired Olympics night – where values were keenly shown as more than just money – that the slopes of Mount Olympus are slippery but not completely impassable: a Danny Boyle-inspired dose of self-actualisation.

I still say to myself when I am depressed and and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people “Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.” — G. H. Hardy (A Mathematician’s Apology)

Yesterday I  discovered an old (1987) British documentary on Srinivasa Ramanujan, which was pretty recently uploaded. I was not surprised to see that the video was made available by Christopher J. Sykes, who has been uploading older documentaries (including those by himself) on youtube (For example – The delightful “Richard Feynman and the Quest for Tannu Tuva” was uploaded by him as well. I blogged about it a couple of years ago!). Thanks Chris for these gems!

Since the documentary is pretty old, it is a little slow. But if you have one hour to spare, you should watch it! It features his (now late) widow, a quite young Béla Bollobás and the late Nobel Laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The video is embedded below – in case of any issues also find it linked here.

________________

[Ramanujan: Letters from an Indian Clerk]

________________

I could have written something on Ramanujan, but decided against it. Instead, I’d close this post with an excerpt from a wonderful essay by Freeman Dyson on Ramanujan published in Ramanujan: Essays and Surveys by Berndt and Rankin

Ramanujan: Essays and Surveys (click on image to view on Amazon)

A Walk Through Ramanujan’s Garden — F. J. Dyson

[...] The inequalities (8), (9) and (10) were undoubtedly true, but I had no idea how to prove them in 1942. In the end I just gave up trying to prove them and published them as conjectures in our student magazine “Eureka”. Since there was half a page left over at the end of my paper, they put in a poem by my friend Alison Falconer who was also a poet and mathematician. [...]

Short Vision

Thought is the only way that leads to life.

All else is hollow spheres

Reflecting back

In heavy imitation

And blurred degeneration

A senseless image of our world of thought.

.

Man thinks he is the thought which gives him life.

He binds a sheaf and claims it as himself.

He is a ring through which we pass swinging ropes

Which merely move a little as he slips.

.

The Ropes are Thought.

The Space is Time.

Could he but see, then he might climb.

________________

Onionesque Reality Home >>

Tao was a child prodigy, one of the subjects in the longitudinal research on exceptionally gifted children by education researcher Miraca Gross. His father told the press that at the age of two, during a family gathering, Tao attempted to teach a 5-year-old child Arithmetic and English. According to Smithsonian Online Magazine, Tao could carry out basic arithmetic by the age of two.

Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university level mathematics courses at the age of nine. He is one of only two children in the history of the Johns Hopkins’ Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just 8 years old (he scored a 760).

Tao’s genius at mathematics began early in life. He started to learn calculus when he was 7, at which age he began high school; by 9 he was already very good at university-level calculus.  By 11, he was thriving in international mathematics competitions. Tao was 20 when he earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University, and he joined UCLA – University of California, Los Angeles ‘s faculty that year. UCLA promoted him to full professor at age 24 and remains the youngest person ever appointed to that rank by the institution.

Tao’s secrets for success in his own words:

Tao offered some insight. “I don’t have any magical ability,” he said. “I look at a problem, and it looks something like one I’ve done before; I think maybe the idea that worked before will work here. Nothing’s working out; then you think of a small trick that makes it a little better but still is not quite right. I play with the problem, and after a while, I figure out what’s going on.

“Most people, faced with a math problem, will try to solve the problem directly,” he said. “Even if they get it, they might not understand exactly what they did. Before I work out any details, I work on the strategy. Once you have a strategy, a very complicated problem can split up into a lot of mini-problems. I’ve never really been satisfied with just solving the problem. I want to see what happens if I make some changes; will it still work?  If you experiment enough, you get a deeper understanding. After a while, when something similar comes along, you get an idea of what works and what doesn’t work.

“It’s not about being smart or even fast,” Tao added. “It’s like climbing a cliff: If you’re very strong and quick and have a lot of rope, it helps, but you need to devise a good route to get up there. Doing calculations quickly and knowing a lot of facts are like a rock climber with strength, quickness and good tools. You still need a plan — that’s the hard part — and you have to see the bigger picture.”

Tao’s Awards & Recognitions:

References: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Terence-Tao-Mozart-of-Math-7252.aspx?RelNum=7252

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/preprints/cv.html

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Tao.html

# Saluting Academicians # Intelligence