Bathroom Culture

As noted in /. today,

“Quinn Dombrowski, a member of the University of Chicago’s central IT staff, has been recording the graffiti left in the Joseph Regenstein Library Since September 2007. To date she has photographed and transcribed over 620 pieces of graffiti; over 410 of them are datable to within a week of their creation. She has now published in Inkling Magazine a statistical analysis of the entire graffiti collection covering such subjects as love, hate, despair, sex, anatomy, and temporal fluctuations of each of these. After November, both love and despair graffiti drop off significantly until spring, while sex graffiti reaches its one and only peak in December before declining for the rest of the school year. The story includes links to all of the original graffiti photos, which the researcher has made freely available to use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.”

I have been interested in the graffiti around me since the first day in college. While they are pretty much all over the place, there are two locations worthy of honorable mention. The first one is in the men’s bathroom in the math and computer science library on the 4th floor of Building 380. It contains a concise yet sophisticated equation: 2×2=171. Beneath it are several lines of notations, or maybe, proof. The other place is in the men’s bathroom on the first floor of Meyer Library. The facade was changed since the beginning of my senior year and many precious writings were gone. I remember there was a heated discussion on women, quite naturally. What puzzles me is that so many people poop with their pens. A great discussion indeed needs collaboration. There is no “i” in pens.

Mi vida entera

Jorge Luis Borges

Aquí otra vez, los labios memorables, único y semejante a vosotros.
He persistido en la aproximación de la dicha y en la intimidad de la pena.
He atravesado el mar. He conocido muchas tierras; he visto una mujer y dos o tres hombres.
He querido a una niña altiva y blanca y de una hispánica quietud.
He visto un arrabal infinito donde se cumple una insaciada inmortalidad de ponientes.
He paladeado numerosas palabras.
Creo profundamente que eso es todo y que ni veré ni ejecutaré cosas nuevas.
Creo que mis jornadas y mis noches se igualan en pobreza y en riqueza a las de Dios y a las de todos los hombres.

Jorge Luis Borges
Luna de enfrente (1925)

qotd

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.

- G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology

Susan Sontag: a letter to Borges

13 June 1996 New York

Dear Borges,

Since your literature was always placed under the sign of eternity, it doesn’t seem too odd to be addressing a letter to you. (Borges, it’s 10 years!) If ever a contemporary seemed destined for literary immortality, it was you. You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit. Though you lived among us for a rather long time, you perfected practices of fastidiousness and of detachment that made you an expert mental traveller to other eras as well. You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like, “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.

Your modesty was part of the sureness of your presence. You were a discoverer of new joys. A pessimism as profound, as serene, as yours did not need to be indignant. It had, rather, to be inventive – and you were, above all, inventive. The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer – delicately you added: all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)

You have been a great resource, for other writers. In 1982 – that is, four years before you died – I said in an interview, “There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer… Very few writers of today have not learnt from him or imitated him.” That is still true. We are still learning from you. We are still imitating you. You gave people new ways of imagining, while proclaiming over and over our indebtedness to the past, above all, to literature. You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic”. Of course, it means nothing less then the death of inwardness – and of the book.

This time around, there will be no need for a great conflagration. The barbarians don’t have to burn the books. The tiger is in the library. Dear Borges, please understand that it gives me no satisfaction to complain. But to whom could such complaints about the fate of books – of reading itself – be better addressed than to you? (Borges, it’s 10 years!) All I mean to say is that we miss you. I miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this 21st century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.

Extracted from ‘Where the Stress Falls’ by Susan Sontag (Jonathan Cape, £17.99).

© Susan Sontag 2001

quote of the day

我要用芝麻，打开漫漫长夜。

Got my first business card

The first and so far the only business card in my life was waiting for me on my desk. Numerous people have worked on this same desk, found the same deck of cards waiting there, and left for either being promoted or being fired, who knows which is better.

So I am sitting here staring at my deck of cards. There are more than 100 of them. All look the same, with exactly the same looking, the same weight, the same quality (the best of all they say), the same pretension to be professional. Just like everyone who has worked on this desk, and everyone who will fill my spot in the years to come.

During the course of time, some of them will be gone, lost, discarded, suffering in a hidden corner of this world, while others will be carefully accepted, read, collected, archived, put in a box decorated with diamonds.

A colleague sent me the message below via the firm’s own chatting platform, “I finally got the cards. Not that I am glad. At least we can use them as playing cards in emergency.”

Thus begins the life of an accidental banker.

Squeamish Ossifrage

have been procrastinating a lot before the next three finals. picked up cryptography again, this time actually learned something cool.

Back when I was in elementary school, I read from some news (in Chinese) that the world’s hardest puzzle has been solved and the answer is something related to a kind of  eagle It was so confusing that I basically had no idea what it was talking about. What puzzle? Why is it the hardest? Why eagle… But this memory was so ingrained in my innocent, spotless mind.

The 3 authors of RSA algorithm posted a challenge in 1977, asking people to find the plaintext, i.e., secret message, encrypted in the algorithm they came up with, with a super long mudolus n and super long exponent e. At that time people estimated the then-current factorization menthods would take 4 X 10^16 years to solve it. Hence the hardest.

Less than 20 years later, with the unprecedented development in computer science and number theory, 4 guys eventually solved this puzzle in 1994. It took them 600+ volunteers and 1600+ running machines to find the solution in more than half a year. Wow.

And the answer? “the magic words are squeamish ossifrage.” I loooove the randomness.

Anyway, the difficulty is associated with factoring large n, which should definitely be something I am going over now (and I am still procrastinating…) The prize is not $1 million, but $100. I like that too.

The truth is sometimes random and somewhat irrelevant, and may take a long time to unearth. But it still deserves all the work . Sometimes just to satisfy our childish curiosity. If 20 years is not enough, we can wait.

quote of the day

On the security of RSA in public key cryptography.

Because both the system’s privacy and the security of digital money depend on encryption, a breakthrough in mathematics or computer science that defeats the cryptographic system could be a disaster. The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers. Any person or organization possessing this power could counterfeit money, penetrate any personal, corporate, or government file, and possibly even undermine the security of nations.

–Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995), page 265

Okay, read again:

The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.

The magic number 163, etc.

Also from my number theory and cryptography class professor the other day:

1. What’s so special about exp(pi*sqrt(163))?

2. What’s so special about the polynomial n^2 + n + 41?

———-

1. exp(pi*sqrt(163)) = 262537412640768743.99999999999925…extremely close to an integer. Wow.

2. it generates a prime for n=0,1,2,…,39. Wow.

And the connection between the two astonishing facts? The discriminant [ b^2-4ac ] of (2) = -163!!!
According to some math genius (Putnam scholar), “The reason behind involves deep number theory, such as complex multiplication on elliptic curves and modular forms.”

What impresses me is that I used to think of 163 as such a normal number. And normal = ugly for me. But apparently it’s not.

In a past problem set I encountered a Carmichael number, 1729. That is, I was asked to show that  a^1729 = a (mod 1729) for all a. Those numbers are rare, another example being 561. Then I also learned that 1729 is also a Hardy-Ramanujan number. Please look it up in wikipedia for the famous anecdote between those two mathematicians, which is conveniently copied below:

Hardy: I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

See? Even a number dull to Hardy has some unique beauty. Never look down upon those that appear quotidian. Think of Susan Boyle or Paul Potts. Oh commercialism.

———————————————–

Highlight of the day:

When discussing a computer theory problem set with AZ over Skype, I complained about the econometrics course I am taking this quarter.

AZ: Econometrics is just bad statistics.

Me: Yeah I totally agree.

AZ: Statistics is just bad math.

Me: ……

(In fact I support his assertion in terms of the purity of science, as established in xkcd.)

Last week’s conversation:

AZ: I agree with you that trading is a better reflection of meritocracy.

Me: Yeah totally.

AZ: And sales just takes all the good-looking people. It’s just like…

Me: …like…

AZ: …prostitution.

Me: …

(Facts are biased. I know.)

2 midterms on Thursday. Arsenal @ Old Trafford tomorrow. Go Gunners!

Famous Failures, and something on math

I just saw this inspirational YouTube video:

If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived.

—————————————————————

One thing that caught my attention was the names on the screen. As you might have noticed, all but one names mentioned have their initial letters capitalized, like Thomas Edison and Michael Jordan, however, “abraham lincoln” is presented in all lower case letters. Interesting, huh?

Days ago in my number theory and cryptography class, my professor talked about the concept of “Abelian group” named after the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. It’s not easy to squeeze your name into a math (or physics, etc) term, simply because it is such a great honor that will pass on for generations. But my professor also casually mentioned that sometimes “Newtonian” is written as “newtonian”, simply because Newton is so great that you don’t even capitalize the proper adjective newtonian!

Honestly I have never seen this lower case newtonian elsewhere, but I did come across a webpage discussion on the grammar of physics terms such as Newtonian and Galilean. But anyway I really like the comment my professor made that there is a level higher than getting your name written in every math book — getting it written in lower case.

My professor also joked about the Chinese Remainder Theorem, and surprisingly he was able to give an account of its legendary origin: a legendary General’s legendary headcount of soldiers (韩信点兵). He also argued about the proper use of “well defined” and “well-defined” in math texts. Do you know what’s the difference?

Back last quarter my CS automata theory professor talked about the “Pumping Lemma”, essentially a tool that you can use to pump a string arbitrarily longer and shorter to disprove certain property. So when you work on it, you are bascially pumping it in and out, in and out. Then he commented, “usually we computer scientists think of it as a very bad joke, and as a teacher I am not allowed to tell you this in a lecture. But I guess most of you should have figured it out.” Brilliant.