Blog Archives: February, 2004
What grad students really do
I hope my readers know about Piled Higher and Deeper, a comic about the tribulations of grad student life. Today’s comic, about how grad students spend their days, is funny ‘cuz it’s true.
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ECC in Java
Yesterday Sun Microsystems announced the release of Java J2SE 1.5 beta 1. Java’s a programming language that is used in a lot web server applications and in other situations as well. The reason I’m reporting the release here is that J2SE 1.5 includes support for elliptic curve cryptography. My team at Sun Labs contributed to the API and the implementation (if it made it into the release) was written by yours truly.
And while you’re visiting the Java web site, you may see a picture of Java co-inventor James Gosling at the top of the page. He hosted a lunch for interns at Sun Labs last summer. Choice quote: when asked if he would sign some t-shirts from a JavaONE conference, he exclaimed: “Sign a bunch of t-shirts? F*ck that!”
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Sir Harold Kroto lecture
Harold Kroto “Hey, it’s Doc Brown from Back to the Future.” That shouldn’t be your first thought when meeting a Nobel laureate, but can you disagree with me?
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending my first lecture by a Nobel laureate, Sir Harold Kroto, co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the C60 molecule, buckminsterfullerene (“bucky balls”). (I didn’t post a picture of a bucky ball molecule because I’m betting one of my readers has an origami model that they could send me a picture of.)
During the first part of his talk, Kroto spoke about doubt as an attribute of human civilisation and the role doubt plays in the job of a scientist, and that nothing should be taken on faith but believed only because of demonstrated and demonstrable evidence. (He acknowledged that he didn’t know how to resolve this contradiction for scientists who are not atheists).
He went on to argue that he believes sustainability is the most pressing issue facing the world. I’m sure some readers can give a better explanation of sustainability arguments than I can. With only two possible solutions, societal change or technological advancement, and only the latter being likely, scientists have a vital role in solving the problem, he claimed: the most important problem in science is that of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.
I don’t know enough about energy and sustainability to evaluate whether there are other equally viable solutions. The fact that I don’t know hit me during the talk, and made me think about the difference between scientists and mathematicians. (In fact, at the beginning of his talk, he asked how many scientists were in the room; I didn’t raise my hand.) Scientists are directly or indirectly working on problems (arguably) for the benefit of humanity, with a few exceptions. That’s why a chemist can say meaningful things about sustainability. But mathematicians work on problems that are at best spuriously connected to practical problems, and seem to take a subtle pride in that. Is this, an active shunning of the proverbial real world, a flaw of mathematics culture? Should the brainpower of math researchers be spent on chemistry and physics? Is it selfish of mathematicians to insulate themselves in the abstract algebras and constructions?
Ugh, too much thinking for me. Time for some very abstract category theory. Double ugh.
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