I slept in today, to a luxurious and proper 10 am. This gave me time to shower, dress, and sprint over to Joe O'Rourke's last talk of the conference at 10:30. Missing breakfast wasn't that big of a deal since they fed us almost continuously here until 7 pm, after which we have to fend for ourselves. So I grabbed a danish, munched, and transcribed the lecture on "Point Locations and the Polytope Hierarchy." Be nice to me or I'll post it.
At lunch I sat next to Dan Asimov, and it turns out that we have lots in common. He works at NASA doing scientific visualization, and my programming jobs for the last several years have all been in visualization. Specifically, we're both very interested in 4-D visualization, so we talked a while on that, trading techniques and Tom Banchoff jokes (Banchoff is a well known authority in the 4-D field). I told him the story about how snapshots of my program to visualize a four dimensional database of fossilized pollen appeared in Banchoff's "Beyond Three Dimensions" book before the program was written, and he told me the story of how he was officemates with Bill Thurston (Field's Medal winning and in the opinion of some the greatest living mathematician), was assigned the same thesis problem as Bill (on foliations), and then suffered a severe crisis of self-esteem when Bill rewrote the entire subject in a month. I met Thurston briefly last summer at the Geometry Center, and had a similar thing happen to me: I described my research on fractals to him, and within ten minutes he had not only caught up and superceded all of the work I had done for the last couple of years (this is not as impressive as it may sound. Most mathematics has the quality of being obvious and easy to understand in retrospect. Plus, I later found out that he had worked on a similar problem involving reptiles.), but he then went on to reformulate the problem and completely change the way I looked at the field. I've known many intelligent people in my life -- people who knew more than I did, people who were quicker learners than I am, people who were more creative than I am -- but I have never met anyone besides Bill Thurston who deserved the word genius. True, the word has degenerated into a cliche these days, but it is the only word that captures the primordial, magical quality of intellectual power operating on a completely higher level. It is very, very scary to talk to Bill for extended periods of time, because you quickly develop the belief (justifiable or not) that none of your ideas, none of your intellectual accomplishments, none of your mental foundations are worth anything -- that he could have done them all in a day if he bothered. I don't want to call Thurston inhuman, for that would be an insult to both humanity and one of its finest jewels, but no science fiction writer I am aware of has ever created an alien as an alien as he.
After lunch I walked back to the RGI center with a high school teacher from Dublin, CA. I'm also from Cali (San Diego to be exact), and we had a pleasant conversation about the school choice initiative on the ballet there. I actually mean it when I say pleasant; she enumerated her concerns about school choice, and I addressed them reasonably, with a minimum of the conversational judo to which I am prone (you know what I'm talking about: the art of appearing to take an obviously weak position, having your opponent attack that straw man, and then helping out your opponent with that attack, gradually twisting it until it is attacking his or her original position.) It occurs to me that there are many of you out there in USENET who have never experienced the joy of a pleasant disagreement; I suggest you join up into study pairs and practice it on your own.
The RGI center is located in Burton Hall, and to get to it, you have to climb up this really cool looking circular staircase which surrounds a cylindrical elevator shaft. At every floor there is a walkway from the staircase landing to the elevator; all in all, it looks like it came straight out of the Death Star from Star Wars. Every time I take the elevator I expect to run into Obi-Wan programming the shields to lower.
The next talk wasn't till 3 pm, so I read mail and played angband for an hour. Angband is the latest version of moria, which is one of these nethack/rogue/larn/omega computerized D & D games. They are a particularly addicting form of solitare; I've been playing moria off and on for the last four years, and before that, Bard's Tale throughout high school and Wizardry on a friend's Apple ][ in elementary school. To the best of my knowledge, there have been no psychological studies of why these games are so addictive, but it would make a good thesis. Is it the identification with the electronic persona? Is it the feeling of power and control over a simplified world? Are we plugging into a Jungian mythical archetype here, or are we just screwing off?
Perhaps I'm just trying to rationalize the fact that I ended up playing angband the entire afternoon, thus missing two talks. What makes it kind of worse is that both talks were being given by friends of mine from the Geometry Center, Stan Wagon and Tamara Munzner. True, I had heard both talks before and I knew all of the material, but I still felt guilty to the extent of (1) sneaking into the back of the lecture hall five minutes before the end of the second talk and (2) prominently displaying the handouts for their talks beside me on my table during dinner.
Dinner was hot soup and hot pizza, both of which went mostly untouched because it was blazingly hot and humid outside. I actually went to the food supervisor for that day, mostly for the humor value, and asked him why they were serving hot food today. He looked at me somewhat quixotically and replied, "Because that's what's on today's menu," as if he was totally unaware that it was centralized planning like this which caused the fall of the USSR. And then, with the audacity of Marie Antonette, he added the infamous Vegetarian Cover-all: "And besides, there's always salad." When I suggested that the nutritional value of vegetables were grossly inflated by the medical establishment in a covert operation to force us into a socialist health care system, he sort of stepped carefully away and asked me if I wanted to talk to the head supervisor. Pansy.
After dinner, we couldn't get enough people together to play a real game of Ultimate, so me and three of the undergraduates took turns being goalie and fending off shots. This was good practice for me, as my underhand was a bit lacking in the speed compartment. The strategy we eventually settled into, though, was bouncing the frisbee off the ground a couple of feet in front of the goal, so that it would bounce forward in a random direction.
The grad student talk for the evening was on "Crystallographic Reptiles," which was way cool because it connected a lot with my own fractal research (a reptile basically being a fractal which tiles the plane; i.e., a self-replicating tiling, therefore "reptile" -- get it?) Good talk, nifty pictures, and Gotz Gelbrich, the speaker, even mentioned, as one of the applications of reptiles, a fractal version of Tetris. The observant reader will here remember that the first grad student talk (mine) was on fractals and that the second was on Tetris; the big joke after Gotz's talk was that if he had mentioned oriented manifolds (the subject of the third talk), we would have had to given him some sort of prize.
After the talk I went back to the RGI center and read News. They've got two rooms of IBM clones here, and I'm actually not that unhappy about them. True, I don't have multiple multitasking windows, but the telnet software allows me to have five screens of active connections which is the next best thing. In the time space which I normally write up these articles, I wrote a posting to sci.math.research on the applications of IFS fractals, because someone asked about it, and I'm getting really tired of people who think IFSs are good for image compression. I'm sort of pissed, because as of 11:12 pm today (the next day), the posting still hasn't appeared in s.m.r, or in s.m and sci.fractals, where I cross-posted it. Perhaps the moderation affects the cross-postings, but then again, mit's newsfeed has been screwy the last couple of days.