Talking in L.A. Talking in L.A. Nobody Talks in L.A.

Yesterday I gave a talk on quantum computing in Los Angeles at math-club. What is math-club? From their website (“be there or be square”):

People who like books and stories have movies, libraries, and even book clubs to amuse them. Those interested in math and logic have amazon.com and the occasional brain teaser at the back of in-flight magazines.
MATH-CLUB was formed to engage a group of LA’s math-inclined people in analytical discussions under an easy going atmosphere.
The club got rolling under suitably informal circumstances — its founder, Roni Brunn, brought up the idea for a math club at a bar and was lucky enough to do so within ear shot of a friend, Matt Warburton, who liked the concept and thought of others who would as well. Soon after that, we had our first math club meeting.
Stewart Burns lectured on a Sunday afternoon in September, 2002, to a crowd that included David X. Cohen, Kirsten Roeters, April Pesa, Ken Keeler, Daisy Gardner, Sean Gunn, James Eagan, and, of course, Matt, using most horizontal surfaces at Roni’s apartment as seating.
Because many of those most actively involved with MATH-CLUB do have writing credits at shows like “The Simpsons” and “Futurama,” some assume the club is only the province of professional Hollywood writers. In fact, the club as a whole is a diverse group of people who punch the clock as professors, computer programmers, musicians, actors, designers, journalists, and documentarians.
Similarly, people come to meetings with a wide range of math backgrounds. Some of the members have advanced degrees in math and have been published; some are recreational users of math. People do ask questions and explore the topic as a group. We kick off meetings with a cocktail party.

Who could resist talking to such a club? Certainly not me. Especially when I received an email from the organizer, Roni Brunn, which had as it’s subject “math and simpsons.” Such subject lines stimulate approximately 90 percent of my brain. If you include the word “ski” as well, then the extra 10 percent is activated and I go into epileptic seizures. Not a pretty sight.
I am especially fond of the math club analogy with book clubs (which were described to me by one of the people present last night as “mom’s drinking night.” Crap, now I’m going to get an email from my mother.) Why aren’t there more math clubs in the mold of book clubs: where small groups get together to hear about subjects which stretch their critical brains? I certainly think it’s a grand idea and am tempted to start a math club myself (but in Seattle we replace writers with programmers?)
When I was at Caltech I would often attend the talks in fields outside of physics/computer science. I called it “my television.” Certainly hearing a biology or geology talk and trying to discern what the heck they were talking about made me feel like a total moron. But whenever you hear a good talk outside of your field, you get a little bit of the feeling for what is going on, and this feels great. I personally wish that more graduate students would do this in order to help combat the graduate student fatigue which comes from being far to narrowly focused and not remembering why it is that all of science is interesting.
Anyway, it was a fun talk, and hopefully I didn’t punish people too much. When I was in Italy recently, I noticed that when I noticed that the students were not understanding the English I was using, I would try to fix this by reverting back to speaking in idioms, which are simpler, of course, but totally incomprehensible to the Italian students. I noticed last night that I sometimes do a similar thing when I give a talk: when I’m talking about something and I think people are lost, I oscillate back to a language which is far simpler but whose content doesn’t really help to discern my original meaning. What I need to learn to do is to ramp down to medium levels with content. Ah well, much to learn about this “giving talks” thing.