Some weeks ago Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong and Bee of Backreaction had a video-chat on all sorts of things (see the links above to see the whole clip) including the nine minute passage below on ‘the future of (science) blogs’.

The crucial point being that blogging takes time and that one often feels that the time invested might have been better spend doing other things. Bee claims it doesn’t take her that long to write a post, but given their quality, I would be surprised if it took her less than one to two hours on average.

Speaking for myself, I’ve uploaded two (admittedly short) notes to the arXiv recently. The shorter one took me less time than an average blogpost, the longer one took me about the time I need for one of the better posts. So, is it really justified to invest that amount of time in something as virtual as a blog?

Probably it all depends on the type of blog you’re running and what goal (if any) you want to achieve with it.

I can see the point in setting up a blog connected to a book you once wrote or intend to write (such as Not Even Wrong or Terry Tao).

I can also understand that people start a blog to promote their research-topic or to have a social function for people interested in the same topic (such as Noncommutative Geometry or the n-category cafe).

I can even imagine the energy boost resulting from setting up a group-blog with fellow researchers working at the same place (such as Secret Blogging Seminar or the Everything Seminar and some others).

So, there are plenty of good reasons to start and keep investing in a serious mathematical blog (as opposed to mere link-blogs (I won’t mention examples) or standard-textbook-excerpts-blogs (again, I’ll refrain from giving examples)).

What is needed is either a topical focus or a clear medium term objective. Unfortunately, this blog has neither…

At present, I feel like the journalist, spending too much time getting into a subject merely to write a short piece on it for today’s paper, which will be largely forgotten by tomorrow, but still hoping that his better writings will result into something having a longer half-life…

That is, I need to reconsider the future of this blog and will do so over a short vacation. As always, suggestions you might have are welcome. Perhaps I should take the bait offered by John McKay in his comment yesterday and do a series on the illusory 24-dimensional monster-manifold.

At the very least it would take this blog back to the only time when it was somewhat focussed on a single topic and was briefly called MoonshineMath. But then, even this is not without risks…

Exactly one year ago this blog was briefly renamed MoonshineMath. The concept being that it would focus on the mathematics surrounding the monster group & moonshine. Well, I got as far as the Mathieu groups…

After a couple of months, I changed the name back to neverendingbooks because I needed the freedom to post on any topic I wanted. I know some people preferred the name MoonshineMath, but so be it, anyone’s free to borrow that name for his/her own blog.

Today it’s bloomsday again, and, as I’m a cyclical guy, I have another idea for a conceptual blog : the bistromath chronicles (or something along this line).

Here’s the relevant section from the Hitchhikers guide

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. …
Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.
This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it.So many mathematical conferences got hold in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years.

Right, so what’s the idea? Well, on numerous occasions Ive stated that any math-blog can only survive as a group-blog. I did approach a lot of people directly, but, as you have noticed, without too much success… Most of them couldnt see themselves contributing to a blog for one of these reasons : it costs too much energy and/or it’s way too inefficient. They say : career-wise there are far cleverer ways to spend my energy than to write a blog. And… there’s no way I can argue against this.

Whence plan B : set up a group-blog for a fixed amount of time (say one year), expect contributors to write one or two series of about 4 posts on their chosen topic, re-edit the better series afterwards and turn them into a book.

But, in order to make a coherent book proposal out of blog-post-series, they’d better center around a common theme, whence the BistroMath ploy. Imagine that some of these forgotten “restaurant-check-notes” are discovered, decoded and explained. Apart from the mathematics, one is free to invent new recepies or add descriptions of restaurants with some mathematical history, etc. etc.

One possible scenario (but I’m sure you will have much better ideas) : part of the knotation is found on a restaurant-check of some Italian restaurant. This allow to explain Conway’s theory of rational tangles, give the perfect way to cook spaghetti to experiment with tangles and tell the history of Manin’s Italian restaurant in Bonn where (it is rumoured) the 1998 Fields medals were decided…

But then, there is no limit to your imagination as long as it somewhat fits within the framework. For example, I’d love to read the transcripts of a chat-session in SecondLife between Dedekind and Conway on the construction of real numbers… I hope you get the drift.

I’m not going to rename neverendingbooks again, but am willing to set up the BistroMath blog provided

• Five to ten people are interested to participate
• At least one book-editor shows an interest
  update : (16/06) contacted by first publisher

You can leave a comment or, if you prefer, contact me via email (if you’re human you will have no problem getting my address…).

Clearly, people already blogging are invited and are allowed to cross-post (in fact, that’s what I will do if it ever gets so far). Finally, if you are not willing to contribute blog-posts but like the idea and are willing to contribute to it in any other way, we are still auditioning for chanting monks

The small group of monks who had taken up hanging around the major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect that the Universe was only a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a street theater grant and went away.

And, if you do not like this idea, there will be another bloomsday-idea next year…

Annual reports of organizations often make extremely dry reading. With available word processing tools, however, several agencies try to make their report at least visually pleasing. A good example is the 2007 annual report of the NSF (USA). It has an attractive cover (left) and has a couple of daring inside pages, such as the one on the right.

I’ve been a researcher with the Flemish National Science Foundation FWO from 1980 till 2000, when I’ve opted for a professorship rather than keeping my permanent research position with them. At the time, it seemed like a sensible move to make, but I’m beginning to have my doubts… The FWO definitely rocks! Single handedly they’ve taken the art of science-organization-reporting to galactic levels with their 2007 year book. Here is the cover

based on the comic book series Jommeke. So what? They have an (arguably) even more attractive cover-picture…

The point is that they maintain this gimmick throughout the entire report! If you don’t believe me, download the entire book from the link above. But as it is over 1Mb, I’ll provide you with two generic illustrations : on the left a typical (as in “every”) page and even pie-charts are way too dry for the FWO-admins so they solved it (right)

Probably the message they want to broadcast is : you guys can easily beat us at science, but we still have the best comic-books!!!

I bet, next year they’ll base their report on the series Spike and Suzy (Suske&Wiske for the rest of us) and the year after they’ll probably go for Tintin (that is, if Flandres can forget by then that Herge was a French speaking Belgian). I’m confident that in 2009 the FWO will spend most of its energy debating this issue…

You may not have noticed, but I’m in a foul mood for weeks now because of comments and reactions to the last line of the post on Finding Moonshine. I wrote

Du Sautoy is a softy! I’d throw such students out of the window…

and got everyone against me for this (first floor) defenestration threat…

That’s OK! I sometimes post what’s on my mind and if you don’t like it you are free to leave a comment, and, usually I won’t even bother to reply to it. But occasionally, stuff is bottling up un-healthily.

So, I thought it was a good idea to have a prolonged easter-vacation, somewhere in the south of France. The weather, food, rest, drinks, company and all that were just gorgeous

but …

A quick recap. Here’s the relevant section in duSautoy’s book again :

One of my graduate students has just left my office. He’s done some great work over the past three years and is starting to write up his doctorate, but he’s just confessed that he’s not sure that he wants to be a mathematician. I’m feeling quite sobered by this news. My graduate students are like my children. They are the future of the subject. Who’s going to read all the details of my papers if not my mathematical offspring? The subject feels so tribal that anyone who says they want out is almost a threat to everything the tribe stands for.
Anton has been working on a project very close to my current problem. There’s no denying that one can feel quite disillusioned by not finding a way into a problem. Last year one of my post-docs left for the City after attempting to scale this mountain with me. I’d already rescued him from being dragged off to the City once before. But after battling with our problem and seeing it become more and more complex, he felt that he wasn’t really cut out for it.
What is unsettling for me is that they both questioned the importance of what we are doing. They’ve asked that ‘What’s it all for?’ question, and think they’ve seen the Emperor without any clothes.
Anton has questioned whether the problems we are working on are really important. I’ve explained why I think these are fundamental questions about basic objects in nature, but I can see that he isn’t convinced. I feel I am having to defend my whole existence. I’ve arranged for him to join me at a conference in Israel later this month, and I hope that seeing the rest of the tribe enthused and excited about these problems will re-inspire him. It will also show him that people are interested in what he is dedicating his time to.

For starters, I’m getting old so I’m from those long-forgotten days when you had to do a Ph.D. to prove that you could conduct research independently.

A fortiori this meant that the topic of your thesis was your own choice and interest. The role of your Ph.D. advisor was to get you going and, occasionally, to warn you when you were straying too far afield but that was it.

You, and only you, were responsible to get the thesis finished and defended.

Today, the Ph.D. is just another item on the market to be consumed.

Graduate students shop around looking for the advisor having the best sales-pitch, offers the best deal and, if possibly, the best after-phd service aka the promise of an academic career.

Topic and main outline of the proofs are provided by the advisor and an exceptionally good student today means that (s)he proved a few results along the way on her/his own.

University policy and the promotion-rat-race appear to make the Ph.D. more important to the advisor than to the defendent.

Independence of research today means that after your PhD is obtained, you ditch your advisor and try to get into the slipstream of another more powerful guru, having better after-phd service prospects…

For those who stick with their old advisor, the moment of truth comes when they fail to get a renewal of their grant or a permanent position.

At that time one can hear complaints such as : “That persons’ student got ranked ahead of me and I always thought you were better than that person?” or “The better ranked people for the position are all doing that topic instead of ‘ours’, so I guess your topic isn’t so important after all!”. duSautoy’s captures it all in this one key sentence :

They’ve asked that ‘What’s it all for?’ question, and think they’ve seen the Emperor without any clothes.

As if, failing to get a permanent position is the advisors fault, more than yours…

Just for once, try to be honest to yourself : count the number of hours a day your brain-power gets you over 120 IQ. Substract from this the number of hours a day lost surfing the web idly, trying to read unreadable hep-th papers, socializing, kissing asses, socializing, doing fun things with you fellow graduate students, socializing, working on a relation, chatting, texing, emailing insults but softening it all with a closing smily , socializing, etc… (you know the daily-drill of a 20-30-something phd-student a lot better than I do)

I’ll be damned if you get a positive outcome. But if you do, I’ll be happy to take you on as a PhD student…

Well, it’s no threat, it’s a promise : the first ex-student who gets me into a ‘why was it all good for?’ discussion will experience first floor defenestration! (provided I’ll get my window open in time)

And, to soften it all, I’ll add the obligatory

On friday, I did spot in my regular Antwerp-bookshop Finding Moonshine by Marcus du Sautoy and must have uttered a tiny curse because, at once, everyone near me was staring at me…

To make matters worse, I took the book from the shelf, quickly glanced through it and began shaking my head more and more, the more I convinced myself that it was a mere resampling of Symmetry and the Monster, The equation that couldn’t be solved, From Error-Correcting Codes through Sphere Packings to Simple Groups and the diary-columns du Sautoy wrote for a couple of UK-newspapers about his ‘life-as-a-mathematician’…

Still, I took the book home, made a pot of coffee and started reading the first chapter. And, sure enough, soon I had to read phrases like “The first team consisted of a ramshackle collection of mathematical mavericks. One of the most colourful was John Horton Conway, currently professor at the University of Princeton. His mathematical and personal charisma have given him almost cult status…” and “Conway, the Long John Silver of mathematics, decided that an account should be published of the lands that they had discovered on their voyage…” and so on, and so on, and so on.

The main problem I have with du Sautoy’s books is that their main topic is NOT mathematics, but rather the lives of mathematicians (colourlful described with childlike devotion) and the prestige of mathematical institutes (giving the impression that it is impossible to do mathematics of quality if one isn’t living in Princeton, Paris, Cambridge, Bonn or … Oxford). Less than a month ago, I reread his ‘Music of the Primes’ so all these phrases were still fresh in my memory, only on that occasion Alain Connes is playing Conway’s present role…

I was about to throw the book away, but first I wanted to read what other people thought about it. So, I found Timothy Gowers’ review, dated febraury 21st, in the Times Higher Education. The first paragraph below hints politely at the problems I had with Music of the Primes, but then, his conclusion was a surprise

The attitude of many professional mathematicians to the earlier book was ambivalent. Although they were pleased that du Sautoy was promoting mathematics, they were not always convinced by the way that he did it.
I myself expected to have a similar attitude to Finding Moonshine, but du Sautoy surprised me: he has pulled off that rare feat of writing in a way that can entertain and inform two different audiences - expert and non-expert - at the same time.

Okay, so maybe I should give ‘Finding Moonshine’ a further chance. After all, it is week-end and, I have nothing else to do than attending two family-parties… so I read the entire book in a couple of hours (not that difficult to do if you skip all paragraphs that have the look and feel of being copied from the books mentioned above) and, I admit, towards the end I mellowed a bit. Reading his diary notes I even felt empathy at times (if this is possible as du Sautoy makes a point of telling the world that most of us mathematicians are Aspergers). One example :

One of my graduate students has just left my office. He’s done some great work over the past three years and is starting to write up his doctorate, but he’s just confessed that he’s not sure that he wants to be a mathematician. I’m feeling quite sobered by this news. My graduate students are like my children. They are the future of the subject. Who’s going to read all the details of my papers if not my mathematical offspring? The subject feels so tribal that anyone who says they want out is almost a threat to everything the tribe stands for.
Anton has been working on a project very close to my current problem. There’s no denying that one can feel quite disillusioned by not finding a way into a problem. Last year one of my post-docs left for the City after attempting to scale this mountain with me. I’d already rescued him from being dragged off to the City once before. But after battling with our problem and seeing it become more and more complex, he felt that he wasn’t really cut out for it.
What is unsettling for me is that they both questioned the importance of what we are doing. They’ve asked that ‘What’s it all for?’ question, and think they’ve seen the Emperor without any clothes.
Anton has questioned whether the problems we are working on are really important. I’ve explained why I think these are fundamental questions about basic objects in nature, but I can see that he isn’t convinced. I feel I am having to defend my whole existence. I’ve arranged for him to join me at a conference in Israel later this month, and I hope that seeing the rest of the tribe enthused and excited about these problems will re-inspire him. It will also show him that people are interested in what he is dedicating his time to.

Du Sautoy is a softy! I’d throw such students out of the window…