This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Thursday 7th May 2009 at 9.34pm
The IPL in South Africa
I've seen a bit of the IPL (Indian Premier League - cricket!) again this year. Mostly the competition is good, but the presentation of the competition - all sponsors, adverts, hyperbole and boorishness - is anything but. There was an exception on Monday, however, with an interview of Makhaya Ntini of the Chennai Super Kings (why Ntini hasn't got a game yet when he's been in such great form for the Proteas beats me but that's a different story). He talked about how attitudes have changed so fast in South Africa in recent years, and it was a pleasure to listen to.
"I am a black player, playing for a team from the south of India, getting paid in US dollars for playing in the Indian Premier League in South Africa."
Here's another quote from Andy Zaltzman, on the same subject:
While I'm on the subject of cricket, I should also mention how brilliant Phil Tufnell is on TMS. He's the last person you'd expect to make a great commentator ("Tuffers, can I borrow your brain? I'm building an idiot!") but somehow he pulls it off.
Posted Wednesday 1st April 2009 at 4.27pm
Proof-discovery trees
I noticed the Polymath1 project a while ago, and have been thinking about some related things for a while. Tim Gowers has managed to think of many of the things I thought of and suggested answers to them in his latest blog post. Here's the crux:
The more interesting part of Gowers' post to me (partly because it's one of the things I hadn't thought about) was his discussion of "proof-discovery trees" - basically organizing proofs into a hierarchical structure with the statement at the root filtering outwards into smaller steps. Although Gowers' purpose for these was to make it easier for more people to get involved in a massive mathematical collaboration, they sound like a good idea even for one-person projects.
For example, I'm working on a problem called "Branching Brownian motion: Almost sure growth along scaled paths". (The "unscaled" version of the same problem has already been submitted - see Research - and the "scaled" version is now complete subject to checking for errors and optimizing.) The solution to this problem has been a long time coming, and there have been many ideas for solutions that have come and gone in the meantime. Some of these ideas came from me, some from Simon (my supervisor), and I have separate write-ups of my reasons for abandoning each of them, either in emails to Simon or fully latexed files on my computer. Some will see the light of day in my thesis, but others won't; and if I wasn't a PhD student but rather a "real" mathematician, I would not have a thesis to publish them in anyway.
My final solution to the scaled problem looks rather overcomplicated. The ideas are very simple, and I have done my best to make this clear in the final version, but there are various problems that cloud the issue, the most obvious being the almost complete lack of continuity in the processes considered. Anyone reading the paper will be immediately struck by several avenues that seem worth exploring and promise a much simpler proof, and they have no idea that I have in many cases already given long consideration to those approaches (Simon already has this problem on a regular basis). An online "proof-discovery tree", including abandoned attempts as dead branches, would be a much nicer way of publishing the material.
It seems to me that printed journals are on their way out; perhaps the new breed of online journals might be best off adopting the hierarchical approach. A tree could be submitted to an online journal to be peer reviewed in exactly the same way as papers are submitted now - the reviewer would have more to read, of course, but might have less wondering to do about what might have been.
There are some more interesting thoughts on doing maths online here.
Posted Wednesday 1st April 2009 at 12.33pm
Joanna Newsom 3rd Album???!!!
Happy days.
So exciting!!!
Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 at 10.19pm
Eat like a girl
I like this:
I've made it a couple of times now. I found the recipe on the Eat like a girl blog, which has some other nice things too. You can experiment - last time I used lime juice instead of lemon, and chunks of sweet potato instead of celery. Only problem is I always soak too many chickpeas - they look so pathetic when I put them in to soak, but then grow massively. I never learn.
Posted Monday 23rd March 2009 at 10.25pm
The wanting comes in waves
Posted Monday 23rd March 2009 at 10.01pm
Clare College 2: The Porters Strike Back
MA Weekend was fun.
It's Danny Chan! More photos here.
So, I'm now Mr Matthew Roberts MA (Cantab). What they don't tell you with these random free degrees is that you have to figure out how to shoehorn them into your CV. How do you reflect the fact that you've been given a new degree by a university that you left almost three years ago, one that takes the place of the one you graduated for almost four years ago, when on the certificate it says you graduated this year? Beats me.
Getting thrown out of the gardens by a rude porter ("a couple of them are ex-students apparently") was a bit disappointing, but I guess it wouldn't have been right not to have had a run-in with a porter. I just wish it had been Ray!
Overall it was good to see everyone, and amazing that hardly anyone had changed at all. I was surprised (with no good reason, obviously) to find out that the students who were first years when I left were now fourth years. And that all the PhD students I lived with when I was a fourth year were... still PhD students.
The new court isn't as bad as I thought it would be, although the wooden cladding is a bit rubbish. I do quite like the new statue (the blue collapsed ring thingy that's pictured below somewhere) - but I was pretty much the only one that did.
Posted Thursday 19th March 2009 at 10.30pm
No K5s allowed
My fellow Bath PhD probabilist Marcel Ortgiese pointed me in the direction of a little game called Planarity last week. The object is to turn a series of planar graphs into plane graphs. It's fun, at least for half an hour or so (until you get good at it).
I also got hooked on a game called Fantastic Contraption (introduced to me courtesy of Nick McCullen, a postdoc here at Bath). The object in this one is to get an object from one place on the screen into a goal area, using a combination of wheels and rods. Luckily there are only 21 levels, so I couldn't waste too much of my life playing it, but it was great while it lasted! You can put all sorts of restrictions on yourself - some people have come up with some incredibly ingenious designs. One of my favourites of my own creation is this massively overcomplicated but (if I may say so myself) elegant solution to Level 7.
Google put StreetView on its maps for the first time today (or maybe yesterday). It's very exciting. For example, you can see my school. Unfortunately they don't have coverage of Bath yet, and the pictures of Cambridge are severely limited by the fact that they only go along roads (Cambridge isn't a place that you want to explore by car).
Posted Monday 16th March 2009 at 10.25pm
Erdös number 5
I've been published! I now have Erdös number 5, via Diaconis, Stroock, Williams and Harris.
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The journal managed to confuse my supervisor with one of his former students in one of the references, which is a bit odd - but at least they got my name right! Now I want a Bacon number. If anyone knows of any films I can be in with actors who have been in a film with ... actors who have been in a film with Kevin Bacon, let me know. Any part will do!
Also, I bought a new camera (my old one broke). It's an Ixus 860 - not the newest model, but I got it cheap. I had an Ixus 430 back in the day, but it got stolen on the way to Costa Rica.
I'm going back to Cambridge this weekend to get my "fake MA" (everyone who does a BA at Cambridge gets an MA for free* six and a half years after matriculation - they have give us something to make up for giving us Saturday lectures). Hopefully I'll get some nice photos to show off the new camera...
*There's actually a £5 admin charge.
Posted Monday 9th March 2009 at 8.13pm
Boringer and boringer
That's the current England v West Indies test series, and not nicknames for Chanderpaul and Nash. I can't really blame the Windies: England let them go 1-0 up with a horrific display of batting in the first Test, series wins for them at the moment are about as frequent as innings without a dropped catch / dozens of byes from Matt Prior, and they can't help it if the third umpire keeps giving them lifelines. These pitches are blander than a bowl of cabbage.
In other news, there seems to be a new statue in Clare gardens (my old college):
Without wanting to commit myself without seeing it in the flesh, I quite like it. Much better than Jimmy Watson's DNA thingy and the "Man stuck in a wall" monstrosity they replaced one of the Henry Moores with a while ago.
Posted Tuesday 3rd March 2009 at 10.02pm
Lil' Wayne is a stupid man's Ludwig van
Some guy called Virgil Griffith has used Facebook to draw a tenuous link between musical/literary taste and intelligence. There's one graph for music and one for books - his site is down at the moment but you can see the music graph here. There are some odd results - how did Lifehouse get so high up? - and some clear trends - clever people specify bands not genres, for example - but mostly it's just funny.
Pretty incredible how far ahead Beethoven is though.
The books graph (with some ticks drawn on, not by me) is here. I'm a bit disappointed that To Kill a Mockingbird isn't further right. And that Emma isn't included, nor Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
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