Uncovering Writing

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I remember sitting in an office with a friend and downloading his proof when it was published. I had a small background in abstract algebra and I was able to get through a few pages, but then became utterly lost. I was still enthralled and flipped through it like it was a gift for my birthday! Based on recommendations from two people, I jumped into Simon Singh’s book on Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Singh is a fantastic writer. His writing is lucid and fluid: never too many words, but also never too few. I enjoyed the mathematical background (and enjoyed working through the appendices), historical tidbits, how mathematicians work and the actual story of Wiles’s approach to the proof. It was a detective story with a touch of romance and history to it. It was exciting as each piece of the puzzle came together. I knew the ending and I still couldn’t wait to work through each page!

I enjoyed the history that Singh provided, from the classical Greek mathematic Pythagorus, up through the centuries to Fermat and then to the present. This was a lovely romp through my two true academic loves: mathematics and classical studies. I was happy that he incorporated the story of female mathematicians into his narrative, something I didn’t know and that rarely pops up in general discussion of great mathematicians. Also, I enjoyed the chapter devoted to Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura, and their conjecture that sought to equate modular forms with elliptic equations. This conjecture was the ultimate lever that Wiles used to prove Fermat’s theorem.

Singh also builds a strong case for pure research, even into seemingly unimportant topics. Fermat’s theorem was a cool idea, but on its own, it really didn’t seem that crucial. Yet the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, and the follow on work by Gerhard Frey and Ken Ribet, tied a solution to something that would unite disparate parts of very important contemporary mathematics. Fermat provided the motivation, originally by accident, to improving modern mathematics. Wiles said “the definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself” (p. 163).

As for Wiles, he did amazing work and fulfilled his childhood dream. The book ends with a quote from him that I take to heart: “I had this very rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life what had been my childhood dream. I know it’s a rare privilege, but if you can tackle something in adult life that means that much to you then it’s more rewarding than anything imaginable” (p. 285).

My problem with Wiles is that his success was due to other people doing what he refused to do. I think Singh implies it occasionally. Wiles succeeded because he was able to look at the work and ideas that other mathematics published. Taniyama, Shimura, Frey, Ribet and others had interesting insights directly or indirectly related to Fermat’s Last Theorem. They could have kept those ideas secret, like Wiles did. But, that would have slowed, or possibly stopped him in his tracks. He kept his task secret for seven years, even going so far as to publish unrelated work to throw people ‘off the scent.’ I know this was his lifelong dream and he wanted to solve it on his own. But, mathematical progress seems fastest when ideas are put out into the community and others can add their points of view. This isn’t meant diminish Wiles’s intellect or accomplishment, but it makes me wonder if Fermat’s theorem and the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture could have been proved sooner. Most mathematicians, including Wiles, seemingly went into mathematics due to the beauty of the system, rather than for money or glory.

I highly recommend this book to everyone, from people with no interest in math up to PhD’s at the top of the field.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To borrow the environmental movements phrasing of ‘act local, think global’, I would sum up Thoreau’s Walden as ‘live simply and think hard’. So many of the trappings of our lives are unnecessary for our relationship with the land, each other and the larger world of ideas. Fashion, money, great houses, etc. do not bring inner peace or knowledge (p. 9). Books, time to contemplate and people to talk with are all we should need. He says so eloquently in his section on Civil Disobedience, “There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.”

This is my first time reading Walden, but I’m struck by how many excerpts I’ve heard over the years, without attribution. I think he’d like that, in that the knowledge lives on, not the one who put it on paper at one time.

I heard the following quote in the film Dead Poet’s Society: “I went to the woods to live deliberately” (p. 66). What an amazing sentence and thought. It’s structure is simple, its effect, on me, forceful and profound.

To end, I like his advice in his section of Civil Disobedience: “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a great way to end the year, a five-star book! Sean Howe’s history of Marvel Comics, from its early start all the way up to today is a fantastic read. Not only was I interested in the material, but the author wrote effortlessly, pulling me from the first to the last page.

I was most excited about the material covering the mid-to-late 70s and early 80s. I read Marvel books by the dozen back then, and was thrilled to be reintroduced to writers, artists, inkers and colorists who I had committed to memory and had even seen at Creation Conventions in the early 80s. I loved being reminded of the plots of some of my favorite books: X-Men, Fantastic Four and Daredevil. I loved John Byrne doing X-Men and Frank Miller drawing Daredevil. What a rush of nostalgia and fun reading about things that were very important to me when I was growing up. Speaking of my childhood, it was also way cool that my comic book loving friend Rob was mentioned in the book. Yay Rob! He lived our dream and worked for Marvel for awhile.

I also liked reading about the internal struggles, fights and drama that went on behind the scenes. I never knew this part of Marvel and was blown away. I was depressed about how creative people were treated (often not getting ownership of their creations) and incensed about the greed of business people who came in and tried to milk millions for themselves out of Marvel without liking comics or those who read them. Amazingly, some didn’t even look at the products their company made!

This is a great book and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who grew up reading Marvel comics, especially during the 70s and 80s.

Ever since my grad program in anthropology, I write copious notes in nonfiction books I’m reading. I highlight sections and scribble summaries of important facts. I also “talk back” to the text, using a nomenclature of [D] for my response to the author. I also talk back to myself, critiquing my impressions, using [D²], [D³], etc. It’s a shorthand for me to quickly get at my state of thoughts and the authors. It’s become very useful when I come back to a work and need to get some information quickly.

So, when I got the first iPad, I was excited to try out my system. I read two books that required more than simply highlighting text. Even with the iPad’s virtual keyboard, it was difficult to quickly jot my notes and talk-backs. I got more involved in the mechanics of getting the text down that I slowed my progress and even sometimes lost my train of thought. I tried copying and pasting the [D], but that didn’t work when I was doing D², D³, etc. And, to get to certain symbols, e.g. ampersand and the square brackets, I needed to “change keyboards”, yet another required “touch” that slowed me down.

When I moved to a 4th generation basic Kindle, I thought note taking would be worse, due to the 5-motion button to select letters to enter. It was. Entering anything but the shortest of notes was painful and slow. Highlighting, however, seemed better to me on the Kindle than on the iPad. I also really like the dictionary.

For an eBook reader, I wanted the lightest and slimmest reader I could find. I also wanted something that focused me, kept me from distracting myself with email, web browsing or other online apps. I have some self control, but hey, if you can’t do it then I don’t have to worry about doing it! I basically wanted an electronic backpack filled with books and the ability to do some basic form of highlighting or dog-earing pages.

What I found is that for fiction, the Kindle is the sweet spot. It’s perfect to read, light, easy to carry and travel with and it’s got a great battery life. If I have to, I can suffer through taking notes, but I think that my conclusion is that the Kindle is for fiction and I’ll buy printed books for nonfiction.

I’m a huge bibliophile, so there will be books I will want to be able to hold, touch and see on my bookshelves. An example of that is Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle. I read that on my iPad but then I bought a hardback copy of it. On my Kindle, I’ve read a few books that I’d like to get in printed form. This is especially true for very old books, such as Ernest Poole’s The Harbor.

The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network by Katherine Losse

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Katherine Losse’s “The Boy Kings” is an interesting inside look at the early culture at Facebook, especially from the grunt level as opposed to the higher echelons. She delves into how technical vs nontechnical people were treated at the office, something I’ve seen firsthand during my years in the computer science field. She also exposes the sexism she had to face, both passive (exclusion from male-dominated field) and active (hitting on her and outright harassment).

Her thoughts on the cult-like reaction to her leaving Facebook, as though she was betraying a higher cause, are insightful. She deftly exposes the faux anger of the rich top executives, “Don’t they know this is just business—a huge, personal business, but business nonetheless? And, who was Sheryl [Sandberg, the COO], with her hundreds of millions of dollars, to begrudge a woman her first financial independence? I had worked for that stock, and now I needed it, because, unlike Mark and Sheryl, I was not already a multimillionaire. What for them was just extra, expendable wealth was, for me, money to live on. Whatever I was going to reap from my years at Facebook and my accumulated stock, Sheryl would reap more by a factor of millions. But, for them, I supposed, this really was by now all just a game, and they could afford to overlook any financial necessities, since they had bypassed the need for such considerations many millions of dollars ago” (p. 223). Zuckerberg’s pettiness shines in his final appearance in the book, after he knows the author is leaving. “As a parting shot, Mark told his assistant to move my desk to another floor, removing me from his exalted engineering department, even though he knew my last day would only be weeks later” (p. 225).

She really hates Baltimore, where she went to Johns Hopkins, except for the sole lens she uses to view the world: the TV show “The Wire.” It’s interesting to read a book about the negative side of the virtual world and the lack of living in reality when the author herself views the world through such a distortion field. I was shocked to read that “Baltimore is maybe the least technically advanced, most tragically human place in America. Kids in Baltimore didn’t hack or have computers; hacking for them meant hanging wires from window to window to poach electricity from the house across the way” (p. 56). This isn’t the Baltimore I know, and certainly wasn’t the high-tech Baltimore that came into existence in the 1990s and 2000s.

She also seems to see herself as some arbiter of cool. She knows fashion and “real music” (p. 96) that her tech counterparts can’t fathom. They know bits but she knows culture. She’s very Euro/US-centric, portraying Japan as exotic and other (p. 158) while Rome and California are much more comfortable. She said she wanted to change the world while she was at Facebook, and that salary was incidental (p. 139). However, she constantly talks about money, whether it is how much more the technical staff are paid or how cool it is to have an expense account and spend more on one trip that she made the previous year in salary. I think she’s right to point out the huge pay discrepancy, but reading her thoughts over time it seems that her main push was not fair pay but wanting to make more money and gain status through it.

Turning back to the positive, she makes some excellent observations:

• “What was the benefit of doing everything in public?” [Introduction]

• “This is what an American private university is, not an education so much as a pedigree, a mark of distinction” (p. 1)

• “But just as Facebook makes it possible to do things faster, more efficiently, more cheaply, it makes it possible to hurt people faster, more efficiently, with less cost to themselves” (p.93)

• “I left the dunes feeling certain that life was still meant to be lived, not continuously filmed, mediated, and watched from afar” (p. 103)

• “In the logic of our business, to comment on a friend’s post was better than speaking to them, because everyone saw it. Everyone wanted to see everything” (p.174). This observation was so depressing for me.

Finally, I must have known in the back of my head, but it’s a little unnerving to read that the staff at Facebook have access to all your information, be it a wall post, private message, or whatever. I feel, as I’m sure some others do, as though it’s a private community and that there is no overlord that sees all, just those I interact with. Facebook is a community, but not the same as a real-life community. That’s one of the things the author was very good about getting across to the reader.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What an insanely great read. If you liked Steve Jobs before reading this book, you’ll probably hate him now for how he treated those around him. If you hated Jobs before this book, you’ll undoubtedly find things to love about the man now.

Being an Apple aficionado and a Steve Jobs follower, I knew a few of the items in this book. However, the familial details, behind the scenes at work and his personal life were all new and refreshingly presented. There were also little things, sprinkled here and there, that made turning each page like opening up a wrapped present. I don’t want to give away any secrets in this review so that others can experience the same joy I did. I will quote Steve from later in the book when he says “a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow.” That is what drives me, drives my need to write and create.

Walter Isaacson has done a tremendous job in making a book that is as easy to “just use” as any Apple product. While reading this book I laughed out loud, I cried, I yelled at Steve and I yelled at those around him. The book flows smoothly, the writing is clever and the use of quotes and information are perfectly sown together in this biography of an American giant. I never felt like the book was gossipy. It also never seemed like a worship or attack piece. It presented Steve at his best and his worst throughout his life. This is what a biography should be.

Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics by John Archibald Wheeler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An interesting romp through the physics of the 20th Century. John Wheeler was involved with many of the ideas and, it seems, almost all of the major figures who turned our traditional view of the world upside down. If one looked solely at the physics parts of his memoir, you’d walk away happy with a lay understanding of some very exciting work. The book is worth the read just for this tour de force through non-classical physics.

I felt that the book could have undergone another round of editing. The narrative jumps back and forth through time. That could be okay if he focused on one topic and went through all the times it cropped up, then set the clock back to discuss another topic. He’s in and out, more like one would get if you were at a cocktail party and kept picking up the conversation with him as you rotated throughout the various guests. Exciting conversation, yes, but hard to keep up at times.

While this isn’t a comment on the book, but more the man, I found myself repeatedly “yelling” at the book about his politics. It seems he was an adherent of the “my country, right or wrong, my country” philosophy. I didn’t see any introspection about his nuclear weapons work both during World War II and his work on the much more devastating hydrogen bomb during peacetime. I saw much more reflection from Oppenheimer, Einstein and Bethe. I think he missed President Eisenhower’s speech on the rise of the military-industrial complex.

Wheeler never explores the impact of his weapons work on others. He ignores the rest of the world, focusing solely on Europe, when he sees vindication of his weapon’s work by the fact that Europe had peace for the longest period ever after the end of World War II. He neglects to mention the proxy wars fought between the East and the West in Africa (e.g. Congo, Angola), Latin America (e.g. Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua), the Middle East (e.g. Lebanon, Iran), and Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea).

Intersecting both the man and the memoir, I felt there was a huge lack of humility on his part. He doesn’t need to beat himself up or constantly downplay his achievements, which are plenty. But I felt as if physics in the 20th century would never have happened if Mr. Wheeler hadn’t been around. I guffawed (a word I’ve always wanted to use!) when he called out several scientists (including Oppenheimer) for being less than humble.

Having ranted for several paragraphs, I want to conclude by saying that this is a book worth reading for many people. To see how science was done is crucial for today and tomorrow. Scientists worked together, and PhD’s taught their students, instead of passing such duties on to their graduate assistants. Also, it stirred so much up in me, part excitement, part questioning, part disagreement, that it must be a good book since it got a conversation going in my head and with the person who gave me the book.

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