Archive for May, 2007

The art of postscript

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Many people love to program in Postscript. The physicist ‘t Hooft has beautiful examples on his webpage.

Here’s an example inspired by a tiling I saw at the Alhambra. I learned how this pattern is constructed by reading Professor Raymond Tennant’s article on visualizing mathematics.
Tiling produced by postscript

The best summer job in the world

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

That’s what it felt like when I worked in Bill Uttal’s Perception Laboratory at the Naval Ocean Systems Center–Hawaii, during the summers of 1986-1988. I’ll never forget the wonderful and productive lab where I worked, the taste of Hawaiian plate lunch (bbq+macaroni salad) after a day at the beach, the feel of 70 degree warm ocean water, or the massive helicopters that flew from the Kaneohe MCAS. I rode my bike to work and back. Here is the route.

My bike ride to work

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

Last week, I started to ride my bike to work again. From 2000-2005, I rode to work every day on which it was not raining. Initially, until 2002, I used the Caltrain, which has a bike car, to ride to Palo Alto from Sunnyvale, and from there bike the remaining 4 miles to my office at Agilent Labs. From 2002-2005, I biked directly from my home in Santa Clara to my office, also in Santa Clara, a distance of 3 miles. Since then, my office moved across a major highway, the US 101. I stopped biking, and bought a car, my 3rd Honda Civic in 20 years. After a year of stop-and-go commuting, watching the price of gas reach $3.50, it finally dawned on me that my drive in was only 6 miles. I scouted out various bikeable routes to work and found this one. I cross under the 101 on the Lafayette street overpass. This takes longer but is a lot safer than the Trimble Rd overpass just to the east. My ride takes about 40 minutes, regardless of traffic :-)

Erdős number 4

Saturday, May 5th, 2007

I recently re-read Paul Hoffman’s great book The man who loved only numbers, about Paul Erd?s. I read it a few years ago, but didn’t realize then I had an Erd?s number. I thought only real mathematicians had them. Now, after re-reading it, it occurred to me that I had published papers with some wonderful smart people, surely one of them had an Erd?s number. To start, I looked up “ErdÅ‘s number” on Google, and found the Erd?s Number Project. I found out that the famous statistician J. W. Tukey was Erd?s 2. This got me excited, because I’d written a paper with Geoff Watson, another famous statistician. Now, it turns out that Watson had a written a paper with Tukey on serial correlation of unit vectors. So I was Erd?s 4! I was excited enough to write to Geoff Iverson at UCI, another great co-author. He told me he was Erd?s 3 via Falmagne and Aczel. That made me Erd?s 4 two different ways. It got even better, when a bit of Googling showed that Al Hero at Michigan, another great co-author, was also Erd?s 3! So I am Erd?s three different ways. But there are more links to be found. I have written papers with more brilliant people, including Bill Uttal and James Cadzow. Surely each of them has an Erd?s number. Let me know if you find the links.PS To write Erd?s in HTML use “Erd-&-#-337s” without the dashes. Thanks to Yoshio Okamoto for pointing this out.