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Comment Wagering Madness

Quant-ph people have some interesting comments, but those cond-mat people just one-uped everyone:

cond-mat/0608492
Title: Do superconductors violate Lenz’s law?
Authors: J.E. Hirsch
Comments: Readers are invited to place a wager on the outcome of the proposed experiment, this http URL
Subj-class: Superconductivity; Strongly Correlated Electrons

Wagering? On the ArXiv?

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The Tao of Tao

Terence Tao, in a UCLA press release about his Fields medal:

What are Tao’s secrets for success?
Tao, who was raised in Australia, 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.”
His views about mathematics have changed over the years.
“When I was a kid, I had a romanticized notion of mathematics, that hard problems were solved in ‘Eureka’ moments of inspiration,” he said. “With me, it’s always, ‘Let’s try this. That gets me part of the way, or that doesn’t work. Now let’s try this. Oh, there’s a little shortcut here.’ You work on it long enough and you happen to make progress towards a hard problem by a back door at some point. At the end, it’s usually, ‘Oh, I’ve solved the problem.'”
…
What does Tao think of his success?
“I’m very happy,” he said. “Maybe when I’m in my 60s, I’ll look back at what I’ve done, but now I would rather work on the problems.”

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Awards

Fields Medals: Okounkov, Perelman, Tao, Werner. I was excited to see Terence Tao win because I’ve actually read and understood one of his papers. Not the stuff he’s winning the Medal for, of course. See Michael Nielsen (rising from his deep silence 😉 ) for connections of Tao’s work to quantum information science (by Hayden, Daftuar, and Klyachko.) Perelman has, apparently, declined the Medal and the arxiv is stressed by people downloading his papers:

22 Aug 2006: arXiv.org servers are currently under very heavy load due to demand for Grisha Perelman’s papers, published only as arXiv.org e-prints, which are available below. We encourage you to use a mirror such as lanl.arXiv.org or aps.arXiv.org, and we thank you for your patience as we try to accommodate the demand. Perleman was named a Fields Medalist at the opening ceremony of the International Mathematical Union.

Nevanlinna Medal: Jon Kleinberg.
Gauss Prize: Kiyoshi Ito. And the quants rejoice!

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Big Week

This last week has been a big week. I guess I’ll start at today and work backwards.
Today, we closed on purchasing a home in Seattle and get the keys in a few hours. Yep, it’s sold!
soldsign
One requirement we had when searching for a house was that it had to be house which we could name. Well this house certainly has a uniqueness that makes qualifies it. The street address for the home is 2459. 2459? Yep 2459. “Why that’s a prime number!” you say. Why, yes, yes it is a prime number. Not only is it a prime number, but it is a Sophie Germain prime number. A prime number is called a Sophie Germain prime if twice the prime plus one is also prime. Not only is the number a Sophie Germain prime number, but it is also a safe prime number. A prime number is called safe if half one minus the number is also prime. (Safe primes are useful for the discrete logarithm problem because they have subgroups of large order.) Pretty cool, no? (1229, 2459, 4919, 9839 form a Cunningham chain of the first kind)
Here is a picture of the home:
VillaSophia
Yep, that front yard needs a lot of work! But the bones are good. We’re not sure on the name of the house yet, but given all the numerology above and the character of the house, I’m thinking maybe “Villa Sophia.”
So buying a home means that on Thursday we acquired a substantial debt. Welcome to the American dream!
But wait, who is this “we” of which I speak? Hmm.
Well last Friday, I got engaged! That there is a woman out there crazy enough to say “yes” when I said “Will you marry me?” surely astounds all readers of this blog. And that this crazy woman is wonderful, wise, creative, brilliant, and beautiful makes me feel like I’m the luckiest guy around.
Yep, it’s been a big week 🙂
(As regards my engagement, my apologies to Pontiff Benedict VIII)

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rose.blog

A new quantum computing blog! Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave (the British Columbia company questing to build a quantum computer) now has a blog called rose.blog. Geordie certainly named the blog after his last name, but when I read that title, I hear “Rosebud” and want to go sledding.