lieven le bruyn's blog
iMath
math & manic-depression, a Faustian bargain
Jul 15th
In the wake of a colleague’s suicide and the suicide of three students, Matilde Marcolli gave an interesting and courageous talk at Caltech in April : The dark heart of our brightness: bipolar disorder and scientific creativity. Although these slides give a pretty good picture of the talk, if you can please take the time to watch it (the talk starts 44 minutes into the video).
Courageous because as the talk progresses, she gives more and more examples from her own experiences, thereby breaking the taboo surrounding the topic of bipolar mood disorder among scientists. Interesting because she raises a couple of valid points, well worth repeating.
We didn’t can see it coming
We are always baffled when someone we know commits suicide, especially if that person is extremely successful in his/her work. ‘(S)he was so full of activity!’, ‘We did not see it coming!’ etc. etc.
Matilde argues that if a person suffers from bipolar mood disorder (from mild forms to full-blown manic-depression), a condition quite common among scientists and certainly mathematicians, we can see it coming, if we look for the proper signals!
We, active scientists, are pretty good at hiding a down-period. We have collected an arsenal of tricks not to send off signals when we feel depressed, simply because it’s not considered cool behavior. On the other hand, in our manic phases, we are quite transparent because we like to show off our activity and creativity!
Matilde tells us to watch out for people behaving orders-of-magnitude out of their normal-mode behavior. Say, someone who normally posts one or two papers a year on the arXiv, suddenly posting 5 papers in one month. Or, someone going rarely to a conference, now spending a summer flying from one conference to the next. Or, someone not blogging for months, suddenly flooding you with new posts…
As scientists we are good at spotting such order-of-magnitude-out-behavior. So we can detect friends and colleagues going through a manic-phase and hence should always take such a person serious (and try to offer help) when they send out signals of distress.
Mood disorder, a Faustian bargain
The Faust legend : “Despite his scholarly eminence, Faust is bored and disappointed. He decides to call on the Devil for further knowledge and magic powers with which to indulge all the pleasures of the world. In response, the Devil’s representative Mephistopheles appears. He makes a bargain with Faust: Mephistopheles will serve Faust with his magic powers for a term of years, but at the end of the term, the Devil will claim Faust’s soul and Faust will be eternally damned.”
Mathematicians suffering from mood disorder seldom see their condition as a menace, but rather as an advantage. They know they do their best and most creative work in short spells of intense activity during their manic phase and take the down-phase merely as a side effect. We fear that if we seek treatment, we may as well loose our creativity.
That is, like Faust, we indulge the pleasures of our magic powers during a manic-phase, knowing only too well that the devilish depression-phase may one day claim our life or mental sanity…
NeB not among 50 best math blogs
Jun 1st
Via Tanya Khovanova I learned yesterday of the 50 best math blogs for math-majors list by OnlineDegree.net. Tanya’s blog got in 2nd (congrats!) and most of the blogs I sort of follow made it to the list : the n-category cafe (5), not even wrong (6), Gowers (12), Tao (13), good math bad math (14), rigorous trivialities (18), the secret blogging seminar (20), arcadian functor (28) (btw. Kea’s new blog is now at arcadian pseudofunctor), etc., etc. . Sincere congrats to you all!
NeverEndingBooks didn’t make it to the list, and I can live with that. For reasons only relevant to myself, posting has slowed down over the last year and the most recent post dates back from february!
More puzzling to me was the fact that F-un mathematics got in place 26! OnlineDegree had this to say about F-un Math : “Any students studying math must bookmark this blog, which provides readers with a broad selection of undergraduate and graduate concerns, quotes, research, webcasts, and much, much more.” Well, personally I wouldn’t bother to bookmark this site as prospects for upcoming posts are virtually inexistent…
As I am privy to both sites’ admin-pages, let me explain my confusion by comparing their monthly hits. Here’s the full F-un history
After a flurry of activity in the fall of 2008, both posting and attendance rates dropped, and presently the site gets roughly 50 hits-a-day. Compare this to the (partial) NeB history
The whopping 45000 visits in january 2008 were (i think) deserved at the time as there was then a new post almost every other day. On the other hand, the green bars to the right are a mystery to me. It appears one is rewarded for not posting at all…
The only explanation I can offer is that perhaps more and more people are recovering from the late 2008-depression and do again enjoy reading blog-posts. Google then helps blogs having a larger archive (500 NeB-posts compared to about 20 genuine Fun-posts) to attract a larger audience, even though the blog is dormant.
But this still doesn’t explain why FunMath made it to the top 50-list and NeB did not. Perhaps the fault is entirely mine and a consequence of a bad choice of blog-title. ‘NeverEndingBooks’ does not ring like a math-blog, does it?
Still, I’m not going to change the title into something more math-related. NeverEndingBooks will be around for some time (unless my hard-disk breaks down). On the other hand, I plan to start something entirely new and learn from the mistakes I made over the past 6 years. Regulars of this blog will have a pretty good idea of the intended launch date, not?
Until then, my online activity will be limited to tweets.
Return to LaTeX
Feb 12th
To most mathematicians, a good LaTeX-frontend (such as TeXShop for Mac-users) is the crucial tool to get the work done. We use it to draft ideas, write papers and courses, or even to take notes during lectures.
However, after six years of blogging, my own LaTeX-routine became rusty. I rarely open a new tex-document, and when I do, I’d rather copy-paste the long preamble from an old file than to start from scratch with a minimal list of packages and definitions needed for the job at hand. The few times I put a paper on the arXiv, the resulting text resembles a blog-post more than a mathematical paper, here’s an example.
As I desperately need to get some math-writing done, I need to pull myself away from the lure of an ever-open WordPress admin browser-screen and reacquaint myself with the far more efficient LaTeX-environment.
Perhaps even my blogging will benefit from the change. Whereas I used to keep on adding to most of my tex-files in order to keep them up-to-date, I rarely edit a blog-post after hitting the ’publish’ button. If I really want to turn some of my better posts into a book, I need them in a format suitable for neverending polishing, without annoying the many RSS-feed aggregators out there.
Who better than Terry Tao to teach me a more proficient way of blogging? A few days ago, Terry announced he will soon have his 5th (!!) book out, after three years of blogging…
How does he manage to do this? Well, as far as I know, Terry blogs in LaTeX and then uses a python-script called LaTeX2WP ’a program that converts a LaTeX file into something that is ready to be cut and pasted into WordPress. This way, you can write, and preview, your post in LaTeX, then run LaTeX2WP, and post into WordPress whatever comes out.’ More importantly, one retains a pure-tex-file of the post on which one can keep on editing to get it into a (book)-publishable form, eventually.
Nice, but one can do even better, as Eric from Curious Reasoning worked out. He suggests to install two useful python-packages : WordPressLib “with this library you can control remotely a WordPress installation. Use of library is very simple, you can write a small scripts or full applications that allows you to automate publishing of articles on your blog/site powered by WordPress” and plasTeX “plasTeX is a LaTeX document processing framework written entirely in Python. It currently comes bundled with an XHTML renderer (including multiple themes), as well as a way to simply dump the document to a generic form of XML”. Installation is easy : download and extract the files somewhere, go there and issue a sudo python setup.py install to add the packages to your python.
Finally, get Eric’s own wplatex package and install it as explained there. WpLaTeX has all the features of LaTeX2WP and much more : one can add titles, tags and categories automatically and publish the post from the command-line without ever having to enter the taboo WordPress-admin page! Here’s what I’ve written by now in TeXShop
I’ve added the screenshot and the script will know where to find it online for the blog-version as well as on my hard-disk for the tex-version. Very handy is the iftex … fi versus ifblog … fi alternative which allows you to add pure HTML to get the desired effect, when needed. Remains only to go into Terminal and issue the command
wplpost -x http://www.neverendingbooks.org/xmlrpc.php ReturnToLatex.tex
(if your blog is on WordPress.com it even suffices to give its name, rather than this work-around for stand-alone wordpress blogs). The script asks for my username and password and will convert the tex-file and post it automatic.
Snow leopard + wordpress + latex problem
Oct 1st
Ever since I’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard I’ve been having problems with the webserver.
At first there were the ‘obvious’ problems : mysql-connection lost and php-error message. These were swiftly dealt with using the excellent Snow Leopard, Apache, PHP, MySQL and WordPress! advice from ‘tady’.
Right now, access to this blog is extremely slow (and often impossible), certainly via the admin-page. The problem appears to be that most of my CPU is used by lots of pdfetex-processes owned by www. Hence the conjecture that it is a problem with either LaTeXRender or WP LaTeX.
Anyone experiencing a similar problem, or knowing a trick to resolve it? Takk.
introducing : the n-geometry cafe
Jul 17th
It all started with this comment on the noncommutative geometry blog by “gabriel” :
Even though my understanding of noncommutative geometry is limited, there are some aspects that I am able to follow. I was wondering, since there are so few blogs here, why don’t you guys forge an alliance with neverending books, you blog about noncommutative geometry anyways. That way you have another(n-category cafe) blogspot and gives well informed views(well depending on how well defined a conversational-style blog can be).
The technology to set up a ‘conversational-style blog’, where anyone can either leave twitter-like messages or more substantial posts, is available thanks to the incredible people from Automattic.
For starters, they have the sensational p2 wordpress theme : “blogging at the speed of thought”
A group blog theme for short update messages, inspired by Twitter. Featuring: Hassle-free posting from the front page. Perfect for group blogging, or as a liveblog theme. Dynamic page updates. Threaded comment display on the front page. In-line editing for posts and comments. Live tag suggestion based on previously used tags. A show/hide feature for comments, to keep things tidy. Real-time notifications when a new comment or update is posted. Super-handy keyboard shortcuts.
Next, any lively online community is open for intense debate : “supercharge your community”
Fire up the debate with commenter profiles, reputation scores, and OpenID. With IntenseDebate you’ll tap into a whole new network of sites with avid bloggers and commenters. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
And finally, as we want to talk math, both in posts and comments, they provide us with the WP-LaTeX plugin.
All these ingredients make up the n-geometry cafe1 to be found at noncommutative.org (explaining the ‘n’).
Anyone can walk into a Cafe and have his/her say, that’s why you’ll get automatic author-privileges if you register.
Fill in your nick and email (please take your IntenseDebate setting and consider signing up with Gravator.com to get a nice image next to your contributions), invent your own password, show that you’re human by answering the reCapcha question and you’ll get a verification email within minutes2. This will take you to your admin-page, allowing you to start blogging. For more info, check out the FAQ-pages.
I’m well aware of the obvious dangers of non-moderated sites, but also a strong believer in any Cafe’s self-regulating powers…
If you are interested in noncommutative geometry, and feel like sharing, please try it out.
- with apologies to the original cafe but I simply couldn’t resist… [↩]
- if you don’t get an email within the hour, please notify me [↩]
Hi, I'm a professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium. My research areas are non-commutative algebra and non-commutative geometry. Sometimes, you can also find me here :
