meet 43 people noteworthy enough to have Wikipedia articles about them

Met Douglas Hofstadter this afternoon, on a tour of labs around campus. I had missed an earlier part of the orientation, where I was supposed to sign up for transportation to all the labs, so I had to walk. I arrived a few minutes ahead of the van, and so I had a little more time to talk.

He asked me what my research interests are. I hemmed and hawed a moment, and then said, “Getting computers to explore mathematics the way mathematicians do.” His eyes widened, he got the attention of one of his grad students, and asked me to repeat that to this student. It turned out that this student is working on modeling the way people perceive geometry.

I rambled a bunch about how mathematics courses give you a very refined, axioms-first-then-derive-theorems presentation of their subjects, and leave out the reasoning behind the definitions, axioms, reasons for the importance of theorems, etc., but that stuff is very hard to explain. I said that that’s what I want to model, and I’m more interested in “how you find proofs than the mathematics itself.”

He told me about a course he taught a couple years ago, about visualizing group theory, and how part of the homework was to restate theorems in simpler ways, paring away the detail to get at “the essence” of the theorem. I said I’d tried to do this when talking with mathematicians, and often met resistance, and asked if he had found the same thing. He said he hadn’t tried much, but he wouldn’t be surprised to see that resistance, and offered some opinions about why it happens.

Hmm. I hadn’t seriously considered working with him, but what he’s doing sounds so far like a really good fit to my research interests. Also, just the fact that we could have a conversation about these kinds of things is extraordinary.

Met Larry Yeager this afternoon on a tour of labs on campus.

He demo’ed some artificial-life software he’d written some years back, and told how simulation had enabled a debate about evolution to be resolved. The question was whether you really need natural selection to “drive” evolution or if the apparent “all over the place” coverage of the niche- and genome-spaces could be explained simply by genetic drift. The simulation showed that you really need natural selection to drive things, and it produces both increases and decreases in the complexity of genomes, explaining the “all over the place” coverage.

This is very relevant to my research interests.

I saw Mitch Altman give a little talk about microcontrollers and basic hardware hacking at the Maker Faire. He said that if anyone wanted to be shown how to solder, to come by his hardware hacking space at the fair. I did. I grilled him about brain waves for a while, and then I bought his brain machine kit and spent a couple hours assembling it. I didn’t finish, but I did get shown how to solder properly.

This is pretty damn egotistical, but since I spent about half an hour making the list, I might as well post it:

1. Gerald Sacks
2. Umesh Vazirani
3. Ciprian Manolescu
4. Raoul Bott
5. John Guttag
6. Terry Kitchen
7. Cosy Sheridan
8. Jim Infantino
9. Frank Bidart
10. Matthias Felleisen
11. Barbara Liskov
12. Christos Papadimitriou
13. William Kahan
14. David Korn (computer scientist)
15. Alan Jay Smith
16. Nikita Borisov
17. David A. Wagner
18. Susan L. Graham
19. David Culler
20. Simon Peyton Jones
21. Philip Wadler
22. Eric Brewer (scientist)
23. Andrew Appel
24. Olivier Danvy
25. Robert Harper
26. Benjamin C. Pierce
27. Don Hopkins
28. Bob Franke
29. Lennart Augustsson
30. Theresa Sparks
31. Charlie Anders
32. Annalee Newitz
33. Jacob Appelbaum
34. Pamela Samuelson
35. Steven Weber (professor)
36. C.A.R. Hoare
37. John Hughes (computer scientist)
38. Max Wolf Valerio
39. Ward Cunningham
40. Xavier Leroy
41. Greg Morrisett
42. Melanie Mitchell
43. David Maier

If any of these articles have been deleted since I made this list, then I guess I’ll just have to meet more people, huh?

I met James Yee at the Governor’s Inaugural Ball last night. I was waiting in line to get into the room with the chocolate fountain, and he was standing behind me. I caught a glimpse of the moons on his uniform, and started to ask him about them in a sort of oblique way. He was very proud of the emblems of his faith on his uniform, and talked about his role as a chaplain in the US Army. We then talked more about Guantánamo, his recent vindications in the courts, and hopes for the Obama administration.

Rare for me to be in the presence of a true military hero, much less have this sort of conversation.

I met him at the Obama fund-raiser. We ended up talking about his nonprofit to foster the elderly doing art.

Well, how about this: my latest improv teacher, Gerri Lawlor, has a Wikipedia article about her.

I first saw her perform last August, when I was on a date with a (different) improv teacher. She gave the most amazing improv performance I had ever seen (even to this day). I thought, “This is the kind of improv I want to do.” A lot of the humor was pretty dark (I remember an “Inuit soufflé” served at a French restaurant), but it was genuine stuff, the kind of thing you can only get when you tune into your subconscious and let it speak. During the show, one of her characters said that Werner Herzog had made a documentary about her childhood. Turns out she’s a big Werner Herzog fan, and talked about him some with me and my date afterward.

Last night, she invited me out to see a friend of hers perform accordion music. She told me this guy, Mark Growden, is a genius, and she was not kidding. This was the first time I ever realized that the accordion is an actual music instrument.

This was at the Hotel Utah, an Old West-style saloon. It fit. After the show, she bought me a shot of Jack Daniels, and I tossed it down. We talked about improv, Johnny Cash, sacrilegious videos and musicals we’d like to make, and lots more. I gave her a ride home, and she lent me two Werner Herzog movies.

The class, by the way, has been the best ever. Not only is she an amazing performer, she knows a zillion little tips, and made me and everyone else feel completely at ease. I’ve never picked up so much improv in such a short time. I was nervous about coming to her class, thinking that there’s no way I’d have her spontaneity and truthfulness to character. But she drew exactly that right out of me and all the other students.

Mark Jay Mirsky – my uncle!

I’m sure I can dig up another 15 or 20 people. But I’d really rather focus, at this point, on those quirky, off-the-beaten-path, unsung heroes without a cadre of PR professionals and handlers who make the world an interesting place.

I just discovered that this fellow has a Wikipedia article about him. In the early 1990s, I used to hang out at a Wednesday night salon in Los Angeles where he was a regular.