Math math and more math

That much math? No, even more. In this program at Princeton I have learned in a week much more than I have learned in semesters of classes at MIT. It is impressive the amount of material that we are trying to cover. For sure, I won’t dare to say that I understand every single detail of what is going on. However I have a much better idea of what is going on in certain advanced topics in mathematics (specifically in Harmonic Analysis) which is kind of awesome. This has been only the first week, there are still other two awaiting. I am excited to see what other things I will be learning. For now, I need to start sleeping earlier and drink less coffee.

Filed under: Life

Omniscient, Embedded Methodologies for Web Services

As soon as you look at the title of this article you may ask, “what in the world is this guy talking about?”. Before answering your question, I must say that this is one of my papers in web technologies development and is very interesting. You can check the pdf version of it here. Pretty awesome right? Sure – I guess.

Going back to your question, the answer is: I have no clue about what is said in that paper. In fact that paper was not even written (directly) by me or any other human being, instead it was randomly generated using an algorithm (which is awesome as it generates even the custom references of the article at the end – I even appear in some of them). A second question you might ask is “Why would anybody ever spend time designing such a program?”. For real, I have no clue. However the three MIT graduate students that put their brains to design such a thing perhaps thought it would be interesting to send randomly generated papers to conferences and see what happened. I can imagine them regarding this as a silly joke that wouldn’t work. I guess that they would have never expected to actually get one of their papers accepted. The whole story is hilarious and is explained in details here. You can even got to that webpage,  input your name and get a scientific paper written by you! Give it to your friends ant tell them you are about to publish in an important journal! You could even ask them for the favor of proofreading it, well, that would be a bit mean. However, anyone in their right mind should figure out these papers are complete nonsense after the first few lines – or not.

My question to you is, have you ever spent time doing something this ridiculous/hilarious? And if so, what? I’m curious.

Filed under: Life

Coincidences

The last couple of days, besides being full of more math than I have seen in semesters, have had many interesting coincidences. My trip to Princeton started off by me returning from Dallas and getting stuck at Atlanta’s airport for a night. The details of this annoying night involve the fact that I was confused regarding the layout of the airport terminals and a misunderstanding on the departure time of my fight and a Korean woman who lost her luggage and could barely speak English and was looking for help. No comments on that.

Fact is that after finally getting a flight and arriving at Boston I repacked my stuff and hopped in a bus to New York. The only thing is that I was a bit scared as I didn’t know exactly the procedures of getting between NYC and Princeton. Regardless, I decided to not worry as I would figure it out somehow. Who would have thought that, after chatting with my neighbor-in-seats, he turned out to be Abhinav Kumar: One of the youngest math professors at MIT. It was really fun to just chit chat with him on that setting. To make things even better, he was also headed to Princeton. My fears were erased of getting lost somewhere were gone as I just followed him – he had done this trip multiple times before.

More coincidences? Well, yes. It turns out that here in the program at Princeton there happens to be another Venezuelan besides me. Although this might not necessarily sound as such a coincidence for many, the math community  back home is very narrow. Most of the people that do serious math outside of the country usually know of each other. He realized I had to be Venezuelan after overhearing a conversation of me and my father on the phone. Even better, that same phone call generated yet another coincidence. Another girl from the program asked me if I was Venezuelan. She was based on my accent and choice of Spanish words to base this, yet she was not Venezuelan. She mentioned that she had a bunch of Venezuelan roommates and that’s how she knew. It turns out that these “roommates” are my friends from back home from math olympiads. Apparently she even dated one of them. Random – I know. In any case, I don’t know what to say, too many coincidences for too few days. I’ve got nothing else to say. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.

Filed under: Life, best friends, bus, coincidences, dated, interesting coincidences, math, meeting, missing my flight, MIT, NY, Princeton, random, random professor, Venezuelan

From Professor to Student

During the past three weeks I played the role of an instructor, T.A. and Latex master at the math seminar for high school students. Its funny as now I am in the other side of the curtain – I am assisting a seminar in Analysis and Geometry which will be taking place during the next three weeks at Princeton. It is a huge contrast in my different ways. For one thing I am now the student, I don’t row the show anymore and I have no idea what’s happening behind the scenes. Also, its my first time in such – how to say it – Harry Potter-ish university. When I got here, in the middle of a thunderstorm at 11 p.m., walking through firefly illuminated fields, it was truly as if I was nearing Hogwarts. In any case, I will be spending some time here so I’ll probably need to adjust being on a place completely isolated from the city.

Anyway, talking about Princeton and comparing it to Hogwarts (and really having not much else to say for today) reminded me that the new Harry Potter movie came out. I haven’t seen it nor I have heard any comments about it, but what it looks like is the more movies from Harry Potter that come out the more action they have in them. Enjoy the trailer:

Filed under: Life

Long Days

It has been a very long day, actually, days. Starting from Saturday afternoon, when a I left dalls, up until a couple of hours ago I was on the road pretty much the whole time. It was eventful and hectic. There are so many interesting/weird/cool and not so cool that happened that I don’t know where to start.

One thing I know is that I finally got to Princeton and I’m really exhausted. I have three weeks ahead of me waiting full of serious mathematics. I’m not really sure if I’m ready for it but I really need to catch on my sleep. Tomorrow when my internet is configured (here at Princeton I need to fill a paper application to get internet… weird and YES I’m blogging from my iPhone once more) I will tell some of the highlights of the cool and not so cool things I went through these past two days. But now I need to sleep. Till tomorrow.

Filed under: Life

Wireless Supremacy – Reloaded

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I described my failed attempt to connect to the on-board wireless connection on my flight from Boston to Dallas. Well, today I’m finally going back to Boston, however this time the service seems to work. After succesfully loading the welcome page I just realized that I need to pay (almost $7) to get internet. What is worse is that it will only work for the duration of THIS flight and I still have a connection to catch. I see no point I’m spending that money in half an hour of Internet that I will probably not use at it’s best. The only thing is that I am now going through all of the different cool things if I actually bought it: for one thing I publish this post, but going beyond that I could do things like calling back home through Skype… nice. Oh well, even so I still think it’s not worth. At least for this post I might as well just wait until I get off the plane and submit it through the 3G network. Can’t wait for these sort of services to be provided at no cost – until then I won’t be able to say that I have in-flight-blogged. Hmmm maybe we should call it flogged… Or something.

I just got arived at my stopover in Atlanta and got back to the cell network. Hope you enjy the post of while I was flying.

Filed under: Internet, Technology

Connect the Dots

So… I am done with my work. Finally. After three weeks of working day and night I can rest and look back at all I did. The latex template I described in “Smart Latex Typesetting” was a success: We now have a finalized version including all the materials used during the seminar that spans for over 350 pages. Also, the students seemed to like the classes that I taught and as for me, I had a lot of fun teaching them. However, there is something else that is keeping me excited. For the first time in a very long time I have started to recognize – and do – things that I (believe) am passionate for, things that involve a mixture of my different skills that I really enjoy doing. It’s been a period for me to get back in track, use the tools I have gathered from many different fields and make something cool out of and have fun in the way. It is just the beginning for me, but for once it fells like looking back and “connecting the dots”. And what I mean by this is best explained by one of the most influential entrepreneurs of the 20th century in his speech to Stanfor’s graduating class of 2005, Steve Jobs. He has served as an inspiration to me and his wise words are worth checking out. If you are a young person like me and are still confused about life then watch on.

Filed under: Life, classes, connecting the dots, done with my work, fun teaching, Latex template, look back, pass, passionate, recognize, rest, students, Success

Dejavu

For some reason I’m once again left without Internet and rely solely on my iPhone to blog. Living in an era where having connection to the cloud is as – or more – important than having any other service such as water and electricity, how can it be that on college campus the connection is unreliable to the point that it just comes and goes as if it had it’s own will. Well, it is how it is. I’m done with complaining as it makes no difference.

What i’m actually here to tell you is about Gustavo Cerati’s new album Fuerza Natural, which includes his new single “Dejavu”. One thing that I find amazing about Cerati is his capacity to reinvent himself over and over again yet keeping the essence of who he really is. He has such characteristic voice and his songs have this feeling to them that after rice seconds of listening there is no doubt that it’s him behind the mike. Not only is impressive that he is capable of doing this, but also how long he has been around doing this.

Once again with his new album Cerati has left me surprised and anxious for more. Check out the new single here

Hope you like it.

Filed under: Internet, Life, Music

Serious Comma

Ever since I started this blog my stepfather Igi has been giving me advice on how to manage certain things in it, checks that everything is in the right place among other things. However, sometimes it happens that he suggest corrections that I believe are not justified. This might cause us to discuss for a while until we settle it down. The topics that we have disagreements range from the way Google searches through the blogs, to the way we express ourselves when writing, and … and we have even discussed about that last comma (the one I purposely wrote right before the ‘and’). He argues that adding a comma before a grammatical conjunction is ungrammatical. Since then I would be careful adding these commas, yet I was confused as I would occasionally observe them in newspapers, books and other written media.

It was until my friend Alan pointed out that these commas have a name – serial commas – and showed me the Wikipedia article about them. First off it is surprisingly long, specially for an article dealing with something as minuscule as a punctuation issue (I bet that there are many other important issues whose Wikipedia articles are not half as comprehensive or complete – or long). From this article we have as a fact that these commas don’t have anything ungrammatical in them. There is not even a clear trend on whether they belong to a more British oriented English vs. a more American English. The only thing that is clear is what these commas can both create and avoid: Ambiguity. It is actually sort of hard to explain exactly how and when this ambiguity arises or exactly when it is recommended to be used (if it was simple the article wouldn’t be that long anyway). However it is easy to see that it is definitely useful at times, though in certain occasions it might make certain sentences to be incomprehensible. If you are bored and want to know more about it you should definitely check out the Wikipedia article, it has many really interesting and sometimes hilarious examples. Below are some of my favorite examples of cases when a serial comma can make the difference between a well sounding sentence and a really confusing mess:

“My favourite types of sandwiches are pastrami, ham, cream cheese and peanut butter and jelly.” (do I like creme cheese and peanut butter in a sandwich? or is it peanut butter and jelly? can you tell?)

“To my mother, Aury Tovar, and God” (here the presence of the serial comma makes the sentence confusing – is Aury Tovar my mother yes or no?)

And this is by far my favorite, published by The Times unintentionally on a documentary:

“highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.” (no comments – )

Its clear then that this little ink in your paper can make a huge difference in your college essays, so you better pay attention. Pretty serious comma huh?

PS: BTW, just in this article I added commas without really taking too much care about whether or not they would make things more confusing. I just want to re-read it later and see how bad it is.

Filed under: Languages, ambiguity, confusing, corrections, discuss, effect, giving me advice, hard to explain, not justified, recommended to be used, serial comma, understand, ungrammatical, useful, written English

Automate and Conquer

Today my friend Alan came to me with a problem: “Suppose you have 100 students in a math seminar and you to give two books to each student as the seminar ends. Furthermore, each ranks all the available books. The question is, how do you find an efficient way of distributing the books so that overall ‘happiness’ is maximized”. Also, you want to  have a sense of “fairness” so that no student gets screwed over with two books that he didn’t want at all.

During the past four years, the seminar in which I work at has proceeded to solve this problem by manually assigning books to kids and hopefully, after many hours of tedious work, get to a distribution that is reasonable. Alan and I decided that there had to be a better way and started to think on a systematic solution for this problem. After a while of thinking, it came to me. This problem could be though as a Linear Program! – meaning that it could be solved using a standard algorithm, the simplex algorithm (used heavily in  hedge funds, operation research and many other fields). Somehow after almost failing 6.046 – the de facto algorithms class at MIT – I was thinking about this problem without all the pressure of a grade using what I had learned and was enjoying it a lot.

The interesting part is that, not only were we dedicated to solve this problem using an algorithmic solution, but we were also competing to see if it was worth it. Wendy, another staff member, was not too much a fan of our approach. Instead, she decided to attempt solving the problem once again, manually. In order to compare which of the two approaches was best, we set the following rules of comparison: we would compare the total time it would take to solve the problem 5 years in a row (the seminar happens annually). What this means is that we would take whatever time it took Wendy to solve the problem manually and multiply it by five. However, for our approach, we would consider the time it took us to come up with a solution and add it to five times the time it would take a computer to execute the code. The idea was that, once the code was developed it could be reused as is in the following years.

We spent part of the night brainstorming, learning about .mps (an extremely old file format inspired by punch cards that apparently is used as a standard input for Linear Program solvers), looking for code that we could reuse from the internet, etc. At around 2 a.m. we finally did it. It took us around 5 hours to develop the whole thing and it took the computer 10 milliseconds to execute it. It worked amazingly. Wendy, on the other hand spent about two and a half hours to come up with a solution which did not compare with ours in terms of overall “happiness”. You do the math: 5 hrs+5*(10 milliseconds) < 5*2.5 hrs = 12.5 hrs.

I know, I’m such a nerd. I just think its really awesome to tell the kids at the seminar that they got assigned books by a simplex. Well, I think is enough nerd-ism for a post. Cool though. See you ’round.

Filed under: Computers, algorithm, books, brainstorming, distributing, efficient, Happiness, how to find, learning, linear program, lp standards, manually, maximized, problem, simplex algorithm, systematic solution, total time