Oh, amazing.
Episode 432, in which I experience winter.
My birthday was quiet. Jan took me to the only vegetarian restaurant he managed to find in Bergen, an Elvis-themed fast food place called Viva las Vegis. I got two presents this year: a beaded scarf and a large prime number.
I walked up to the top of Ulriken, the tallest mountain around Bergen, on a mostly-clear day. The top was clouded over by the time I got up, and had cleared by the time I got back down.
Being away from Princeton has given me a newfound enthusiasm to be back.
My new strategy will be to appreciate this place by spending as much time away as possible, so that while I'm here I will embrace a monastic (nunntastic?) life of quiet scholarship.
Since I left Bergen, I've been cultivating my jet lag, going to sleep between 10 and 11 pm, and waking up between 6 and 7 am. We'll see how long it lasts.
I like the IAS. There was a conference all last week, on discrete math, Lie groups, expanders, representations, or whatever the theme is this year, many of whose talks I crashed. I like that many of the speakers have what I characterize as "math charisma", the ability to be precise and lively at the same time, to talk while writing on the blackboard, to tell a story through problems and proofs, and a tendency to punctuate equations with emphatic periods. I like that the mathematicians occasionally start attacking each other during the talks, and I like that Peter Sarnak was often there to heckle the speakers. (After someone presented an O(n^22)-time algorithm, he asked "Have you implemented this? You computer scientists always come up with these algorithms and you never implement them." To which someone suggested "Give it to a grad student.")
And for the first time I walked around Einstein's woods.
The dining hall has apparently decided that it's "Food service worker appreciation month". There are baskets of orange plastic bracelets that say "Food Mood Attitude" on them.
I've seen the name Fourier come up in computer science contexts multiple times in the past week. So I asked Boaz for a 30-second summary, and he gave me an hour-long lecture with input from two other people who happened to be in the office. Turns out that Fourier was meant not really in the analysis-and-signal-processing sense that I had been thinking of, and instead in the algebra sense, in which characters provide a convenient change of basis whose elements have some useful properties. Kind of like eigenvectors.
So the continuous Fourier transform is really just easy power series, and the discrete Fourier transform is really just easy algebra, and all of math is actually talking about the same thing. Why doesn't anybody ever tell the engineers this?
Someone pointed out at breakfast that only people from California say "smoke out". People from other places in the US appear to say "smoke up". This has led to much mocking of my dialect in the form of overcorrected phrases like "I'm fed out" and "blow the building out" and "fucked out" and so on.
I went tango dancing. I think I've found my dance.
Tonight Leo wanted someone to try out his "personal dance kit", an mp3 player connected to an FM transmitter and headphones and a FM radio connected to another set of headphones.
It was 1 am. It'd been snowing nonstop for the last 12 hours.
So we waltzed alone in the silent courtyard of Rocky college, snowflakes swirling around us, enclosed in our private world of cinematic music (think "Nara" by E.S. Posthumus), crunching a woven path through six inches of virgin snow on the ground, lit gothic arches and windows spinning as we turned. Magic.
There is something that I want to capture in these pictures, the luminance of snow, the delicate highlighting of the tree branches, worry-lines of barren branches against the sky. Am I being repetitive? Do you see?
