sickem

10. I was disappointed in Boston to not be able to attend the Monday 11:00-12:00 lecture of MIT's 6.946J (otherwise known as Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, usually written SICM and apparently pronounced "sick-em"), given by Jack Wisdom and Gerald Sussman—that lecture turned out to coincide exactly with Stefanos's talk, the one bit of the meeting I couldn't miss. (Adrian re-scheduled his flight to leave earlier in the day on Monday and offered to reschedule Stefanos and my flights so that we could leave earlier too; I toyed with the idea of moving my flight three days ahead, to catch the Wednesday lecture...) What are these guys like in person? What is a course like at MIT?

Of course they are luminaries: Sussman was a co-inventor of the language Scheme and author of the canonical computer science textbook; he is a semi-mythological hero of hackers everywhere. Jack Wisdom was unknown to me, but a glance at his website reveals that is my error.

The thrust of 6.946J (SICM), as explained in Sussman and Wisdom's paper The Role of Programming in the Formulation of Ideas (postscript) is essentially that there is enormous pedagogical merit in distilling mathematical physics down to the form of executable code, thus removing all possible ambiguity in notation and allowing a certain hands-on experimentation with the resulting symbolic systems. I couldn't agree more, and, in fact, find their text and approach enormously helpful. To me, equations on a page have very little meaning—they are dead and dried. Going through a derivation from a book is helpful; but then I throw away the page after I have copied it, line by line. But in my mind a well-written computer program is an abstract, living thing. Putting the equations into Lisp code translates from dead math on parchment into a working clockwork that you can experiment upon, probe, and manipulate.

Now I see that Sussman and Wisdom seem to be heading in the direction of Structure and Interpretation of Differential Geometry (see their report, "functional differential geometry," published this year) which pretty much makes me want to just go and set up my hammock in some MIT steam tunnel. [As an added bonus, I would then be able to crash Howard Georgi's lie algebras course.]

Disappointingly I haven't been able to find any professor here who is interested in this, though admittedly I haven't approached many. The most supportive answer I've received has been, "Why don't you just use Mathematica?"

the best thing about boston

11. I asked Alex [probablevacancy], when I saw him last weekend, "What is the best thing about Boston?"

"Mixed zoning," he answered decisively, without missing a beat.

Who knew?

when I'm a professor

12. At the dinner table at the LIGO Scientific Collaboration meeting this weekend, I announced a crazy scheme of mine to Evan¹, who was sitting next to me.

"When I'm a professor," I began, enthusiastically. And suddenly all heads at the table were turned to me, looking expectantly, quiet and waiting. Is this such an audacious statement for a grad student to make? When I'm a professor?

"When I'm a professor," I continued, "my grad students aren't going to have these fancy hotels, taxis, etc." I elaborated that when out at the LIGO observatory, for instance, my grad students would pitch tents instead of boarding at the $100/night hotels twenty miles out in Richland. When in a strange city for a conference, they would use their urban guerilla grad student skills to seek out accomodations at local universities. We'd be hungry, determined, resourceful.

It'll be the soldier of fortune approach to the scientific/engineering enterprise. In fact, I think with a little ingenuity, the A-team premise could be easily adapted to a grad student context (exercise for reader):

"Ten years ago a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... THE A-TEAM"

It was remarked, "that's not grad school, that's reality television."

¹He reads this livejournal, I think, but refuses to make an account!