Bumblebee

If you are searching for a new activity this semester, and you think you want to give horseback riding a chance, then you can go to the McGill Athletics website and sign up for 1 of 12 available slots. The lessons take place at a school called Equitation Elysee, in a farm in St. Lazare, one-hour drive away from downtown Montreal.

Commuting there by public transportation is next to impossible, but if you don’t have a car, the instructor will put you in contact with other students who do, so you can share the ride. The students range from 5-year olds to 70-year olds, and a previous background is not assumed.  The instructor, Jo Sweet, is very experienced, she will tell you when you’re doing things wrong and will help you individually to improve your technique. A typical lesson starts by the student grooming the horse before the ride in the stables, then guiding the horse to the arena for the exercises. I should mention that the purpose of the lessons is to control the gait and speed of the horse, and eventually perform jumps; not to simply go riding along trails. The arena is cool though, and there is classical music playing while you’re training. The school runs all year round, and you can contact Jo even if you’re not a McGill student.

One of the courses I was taking during my third year of undergraduate studies was a full-year Abstract Algebra course, covering among others ring theory and Galois theory in great detail. The course was a requirement for my program, and it was one of the few courses that I was not sure at all I’d enjoy. It turned out that many of my friends in Math enjoyed it, but I didn’t. I felt no, or very few connections with Computer Science (later I discovered through friends that if you study advanced complexity theory and theoretical Computer Science it will be very useful), and as a result I started feeling unmotivated.

At some point during the same year I found a book called “Mathematics and Technology” by Christiane Rousseau and Yvan Saint-Aubin. This book was different, extremely refreshing and motivating. Each chapter is a technological problem that has been solved via applied mathematics. For instance, it presents the math behind: the trilateration of the GPS, the motion of a robotic arm in 3D, error correcting codes, public-key cryptography, Google’s PageRank algorithm, why MP3‘s are sampled at 44.1Khz, the JPEG compression standard, the DNA computer (super-cool chapter!), and many other applications. The book is simply a collection of really interesting problems, accompanied by the mathematical background and principles that allow the reader to understand the basic solutions to those problems. It’s not a perfect or comprehensive book by any means, but it is a beautiful one, in the sense that every chapter is a nicely-told story and the provided theory is strongly tied to each application. I think the mathematical maturity it requires is at most that of a 3rd year undergraduate student in math, though I’m sure you could understand most of it with a basic Calculus and Linear Algebra background.

Richard Hamming’s “You and your research” is an essay that is often recommended reading for graduate students, as a means of advice from an accomplished scientist. I agree with most of the points he raised: work on the important problems in your field, get the courage to try to solve them, be prepared, be patient and positive etc. There is one point that he made though, which has really bothered me from the day I first read the transcription of his speech:

I had incipient ulcers most of the years that I was at Bell Labs. I have since gone off to the Naval Postgraduate School and laid back somewhat, and now my health is much better. But if you want to be a great scientist you’re going to have to put up with stress. You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist.

This really doesn’t make much sense to me. Why does willingness to compromise your health make you a more dedicated scientist? Is a sick or dead scientist better than a healthy one? Is constant stress and fear a prerequisite for being productive and creative? I don’t think they are.

I think I prefer Emerson’s “The American Scholar“.