the powers of words 1: if

•18 June 2017 • 1 Comment

I like words.  I’ve always liked words, and I am in no way unique in liking words.  But there are some words that I spend more time and attention on than other words.  One of these is IF, my favourite 2 letter word.

I think that IF is an exceptionally powerful word.  Perhaps this comes from my life as a mathematician, wherein we regularly use IF to create worlds and entire alternate universes.  IF my situation satisfies these assumptions, THEN I can do all of the following things, and this is a very common sort of mathematical statement. 

We do of course have to be careful.  When we start with a statement that is false, that is when we start with IF (and then something false), then we can do anything.  And this is where mathematics and fiction part ways.   In mathematics, we use IF to keep ourselves on the straight and narrow path.  We start with IF (and then something true), we see explore the places to which we can get, starting from there.
In fiction, though, I think it’s different.  IF is still a remarkably powerful word, but we no longer need to tie it to truth.  Rather, we need only tie it to something sufficiently plausible to be the point from which we start the story.  Perhaps our IFs are true, perhaps not.  Perhaps there is faster than light travel and warp drive and wormhole travel, and we can enjoy these stories. 

I don’t keep a list of my favourite IFs, my favourite sufficiently plausible beginnings, but science fiction is rife with them.  Very little of what we read and what we write, or try and write, can begin without some IF at its core, some assumption of the world being different than it currently is, that allows the story begin.  

There are some spectacular IFs out there.  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the notion of the beast within.  Frankenstein and the birth of the mad scientist, as though electricity might be enough to break the power of death over life.  The Borg, which I have to admit is one of my favourite IFs, the group mind that continues to assimilate and grow.  IF there is a set of rules of behaviour to which we all bind ourselves, what consequences might flow.  

And thinking about IF, I have a quest, and it’s an unfortunate quest.  I want to develop the IF that captures the imagination of others.  The IF that creates new worlds that others want to explore.  

The reason it’s unfortunate is that the hurdle is high.  What might capture the imagination with so many others trying the same thing.  But what else is there to do.  And so, we step away from the blog and we see what worlds we can create.

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another old lesson come back to haunt me

•2 June 2017 • Leave a Comment

Years and years ago now, when I was a relatively new lecturer, I attended a course of teaching large lectures.  As a mathematics lecturer, I teach many large lectures and so I attended, and there is one thing I remember from that course.  Unfortunately, I don’t remember who taught the session and that is something about which I feel sad.

The person giving the session started with a simple exercise.  As quick as you can, he asked us, list the months of the year, and though I don’t remember, we as a group most likely then mumbled January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December under our breaths and a low murmur filled the room.  Probably.  I just timed myself, and it took me just under 5 seconds.

Next, he said, list the months of the year, but in alphabetical order.  This takes longer.  And I still tend to forget August, which is now second instead of eighth, even though I’ve done this more than once.

The point he was making is that just because we know something, in this case the months of the year, we aren’t necessarily able to use that thing we know, in any way we want to use it.  There are constraints and restrictions on the things we know, on the knowledge we hold in our heads, and we are not able to use that knowledge in any way we wish.

When I’m teaching, I tell this story, and I tell it because I think this basic lesson is an important and useful and incredibly helpful lesson.  Just because we have a piece of knowledge, a collection of fact in our head, doesn’t mean that we have control over that knowledge, over those facts.

And so I would ask, give it a try.  I don’t think you need to time yourself listing the months of the year in their usual chronological order.  The 5 seconds I give above is probably not out of line.  But time yourself listing them in alphabetical order, and see how things go. And then I invite you to think about this basic lesson, and as you go through your days, to see just how often this basic lesson turns out to be useful.  Because I think it’s rather nifty.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

the value of an old lesson

•24 May 2017 • Leave a Comment

When I a young in the ways of being a grad student (postgrad to the British), my advisor Bernie Maskit gave me some advice that I’ve always carried with me.  To be a successful mathematician, he said, you need to have two things.  One is a good noise generator, the (figurative) voice in the back your head that spits out possible things to do, ideas to try, directions of mathematical travel.

The other is a robust filter.  After all, most of the ideas that come out of the dark nooks and crannies of your mind will be crazy (in the best possible way, perhaps), or unworkable, or wrong, or already done (as has happened a few times), or things to save for later, or things that are beyond what you know or even what can be done.  That’s not to say, don’t write them down, and so I got into the habit of writing things down.  But rather, not for now.

This is the first piece of advice I give to grad students when they start with me, and other grad students over an afternoon beer, or to anyone who will listen, to be honest.  And people who’ve known me for a while will have heard the bones of this story more times than I can count.

But lately I’ve been thinking about this basic structure of the idea generator and the filter, and the more I think about it, the more robust it gets.  In thinking about my teaching, for instance, I have lots of ideas that to be fair are crazy or unworkable or to be done later.  And both having the ideas, things to try, and the filter, the thing to try next which might be the one that works best, have stood me in good stead.

But the area where I think this basic structure has perhaps the most value is the administrative work I do.  Higher education in the UK is entering a period of turmoil, with the Teaching Excellence Framework and Brexit and just the general uncertainty now in the world, but also because the fundamental model underlying higher education everywhere is changing.

And here, we are always looking for new ideas, new ways of doing things, new things to try to address the problems that no one has yet been able to solve, and it is here that I think that we need better filters.

It’s easy to come up with an idea and launch into a new scheme.  But the question I’ve started to ask myself is, if in my research there are ideas that need some time to develop or a quiet place to be laid to rest, then why isn’t this true in the other areas of my work.  And I think it is.  There is great pressure to change, to do things differently, and we are all a-changing.  But perhaps we also need to engage our filters, to make sure that the change we’re enacting is change that will do us good in the long run.  Just a thought.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

reflections on EasterCon 4: tying up loose ends

•14 May 2017 • Leave a Comment

While at EasterCon last month, I set myself a challenge, as noted in reflections on EasterCon 2: the beginnings of things.  I started with an idea and I set myself the challenge of writing (the first draft of) an entire story during EasterCon.  Not surprisingly, I didn’t entirely succeed.

I spent time going to panels, talking to friends, the occasional drink in the bar, and I spent significantly less time writing than I’d intended.  But I have now finished the first draft of that story.  I will admit that I cheated a bit, in that I melded the current political news of the day with an idea I’d been playing around with for some years.

And it’s this last part I found interesting.  I have an idea.  It’s a crazy idea, an idea that anyone who read my first drafts will recognize as a genuinely bonkers idea, and it’s an idea that I’m still trying to find the right home for.  Is this current draft the right home for this idea?   Perhaps, but I’m not entirely sure.

But this now leads me down another read.  We write for particular audiences.  We each as authors have the ideas we like to explore.  And we all have a list of ideas for future projects, stories or longer, not all of which will be written.  Not all of which can be written.

But perhaps ideas are like pegs.  Some ideas are round ideas, and some stories are square holes, and round ideas can’t always be made to fit into square story holes.  I’ve tried a lot of different story possibilities for this one particular idea, and I’m not sure what the right shape of story is for this idea.

But even if the current story doesn’t work, I’ll keep trying, and I will find a good story shape for this idea.  One day perhaps it will be out there for all to read.  I’m coming to the point where I feel I’ve made a promise, not as much to myself as to this idea.  I will find it a good home.  I will do it justice.

What I find fascinating is that I don’t have the same reaction to some mathematical ideas.  There are some mathematical projects I’ve been working on for a lone time, and will never abandon.  But there are some ideas, some directions of mathematical travel, that haven’t worked, or that I haven’t been able to make work, and what I find strange, and what I have a hard time admitting, is that abandoning a mathematical idea is harder than abandoning a fiction idea.

Perhaps it’s just that it’s easier to see the flaws in a mathematical idea, the reasons it can’t be made to work, than it is for an idea for a story.  There’s a malleability to fiction, a freedom to make ideas work, that doesn’t hold for some mathematical ideas, where there is a notion of truth by which we have to abide.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

Lulu Hurst and the physics of aikido

•23 April 2017 • Leave a Comment

I recently read an interesting article in Atlas Obscura, a site which contains many interesting and unusual articles.  This specific article, The Victorian Teenage Girl who Entertained Crowds by Overpowering Men, introduces us to the story of Lulu Hurst.  For a couple of years in the 1880s, she had an act where she used the principle of the lever and the fulcrum to defeat much stronger people.

The reason I find this whole episode as fascinating as I do is not that it is an example of a simple physical principle being dressed in the guise of a seemingly impossible feat of mysterious power, though I do have a great appreciation for that, and for the inability of so much of her audience to recognize or understand the physics of what she was doing.

Rather, it’s because of the applicability of the principle of the lever and the fulcrum to aikido.  I have seen demonstrations which are equally as mysterious as those ascribed to Ms Hurst, and even though I have some experience of aikido at this point, I am not able to reproduce or even to provide a sufficiently good explanation of what is actually going on.  This last point is relevant when I find myself teaching.

There is a tendency among some to ascribe a greater or lesser degree of mysticism to aikido, which is not the direction I want to take.  Rather, we are physical beings operating in a physical universe, and I wish to find the physical explanation of what I’m doing and the effect I’m having on others on the tatami, and the effect they’re having on me.  That’s one reason I find the story of Ms Hurst so fascinating.

It does raise some questions, though.  I wonder for instance how she came to her power.  From what little I’ve read, it seems she taught herself, and I would have loved to hear from her the story of how she started that journey of discovery and her experience of travelling so far along her path.

I’m not claiming that a knowledge of physics is necessary for the understanding of or fluency in aikido.  But I do think that if we pay attention to what we’re doing on the tatami, and in particular the things we’re doing that we don’t need to do and the parts of things that are actually the effective parts of what we’re doing, then we learn a lot about physics.

But the body is a massively complicated mechanical system, the workings of which are often hidden by clothing and the skin, and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on just from experiencing the effect of it.  This is I suspect part of what Ms Hurst used in her act, the difficulty of sufficiently clear observation on the part of the audience to figure her out, along with our not being nearly as attentive as we think we are.

But this week and in future weeks, as I’m either student or teacher on the tatami, I’ll bear Ms Hurst and her act in mind.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things

reflections on EasterCon 3: how we write for our audiences

•17 April 2017 • Leave a Comment

One of the general themes that underlay a lot of the discussions of which I was a part at EasterCon was the difference between academic writing and non-academic writing, of either fiction or non-fiction.  Some academic writing has the reputation of being impenetratable, seemingly sometimes for the purpose of being impenetrable.  This is mocked beautifully in an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.

I don’t think that this reputation acquired by academic writing is entirely deserved.  One thing of which I am aware in my own writing is that academic writing sometimes requires of us a degree of precision, in definition and in the use of terms, that not all writing requires.  Splitting hairs is difficult and splitting hairs requires that we have a clear idea of the difference between one part of the hair and another part.   There is of course the question of whether splitting hairs as we do is something we need to do, and I believe that it is.  To understand something, we need to understand it in its fine detail, and that’s part of what we do.  But it does lead to another way in which the fundamental notion of fractalness enters into our discussions, and so I can see that talking about fractals is not something that I can ignore any longer.

But back to the topic at hand.  As a pure mathematician, precision of definition is a fundamental part of what I do when I’m doing mathematics and when I’m writing mathematics, but I have noticed something interesting in my ponderations.  When I am writing mathematics, my primary goal is to be precise in my statements and to be precise in my arguments.  I take for granted that my target audience, in this case other mathematicians, is also interested in this precision, and so I don’t worry about people beyond that intended audience.

This isn’t to say that the mathematics I write is deliberately obtuse, because I don’t think this is the case.  I spend a lot of effort in my mathematical writing, because I want my audience to be able to read what I’m writing.  This is by and large true of my colleagues as well.  I don’t write for me, but I write for the people who might read.

But the way I approach writing a story is very different from how I write mathematics.  And I think part of the reason is that I think I have a much clearer idea of the nature and composition of my mathematical audience, as opposed to my fiction audience.  My mathematical audience and I share a clear vision of the structure of a good mathematics paper, and it isn’t a form that allows for a great deal of variation.

Fiction, on the other hand, is much more wide open in terms of allowable and reasonable forms, and this is one of the things that I took away from the panels and discussions at EasterCon.  This freedom of form is one of the things that I enjoy about trying to create stories, and it is also one of the things I find most daunting.  I am sure that there is a lot of work that’s been done on forms of stories, and this structure of stories is one of the things that I want to dig into at some indeterminate point in the future.

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reflections on EasterCon 2: the beginnings of things

•16 April 2017 • 3 Comments

So, in what can only be described as a fit of recklessness, I have decided to try and draft a story during EasterCon.  I did this a couple of years ago at LonCon 3, starting from an idea that came to me from the events of the news, bringing it together with an idea that I’d put on my List of Ideas for Stories to Write and managed to create a draft.  A flawed draft, admittedly, one I submitted for a quick rejection, and one that I need to get back to, revise and polish.  

And now I’m trying to do it again, again starting from an idea in the news, combining it with another from my List of Ideas, and to be honest, it’s going all right.  But thinking through the structure of the story has blended in my brain with some of the discussions over the past couple of days, listening to panels and in casual conversation with the people I’ve been meeting, and now I’m thinking about the origin stories of stories.

Some aspects of this I’ve pondered before, in Giants, Neanderthals and old stories.  But the origin story that came to mind this morning concerns the fables and myths we have.  I’m reading the Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights, which is a fascinating experience and I’m currently in the part, about 140 nights in for those who have read it, where we are getting lots of short fables, like the Thief and his Monkey, the Sparrow and the Peacock, and the Mouse and the Flea, each of which is explicitly being used by Shahrazad to try and persuade the King to behave more sensibly.

But the one that’s most relevant to the story I’m trying to pull together is Pandora’s Box.  We have an idea of who first wrote down the story and we have the characterisation of Pandora’s Box as an origin myth, trying to explain the origin of the evils of the world.  But I’m interested in a different variation of origin, in that I want to know why Pandora and a jar were used to tell the story, as opposed to anything else.  I’m completely convinced that there is a body of scholarly literature on the subject of why for instance it’s a woman who unleashed evil on the world.

But what I actually want is something that I know is impossible, namely I want to be sitting around the fire when the first version of what would eventually be the myth of Pandora’s Box was told.  What was the event that caused that first teller to start telling the story, and I am fascinated by this history of stories.

I think there is an inevitability to thinking about writing while being here at EasterCon, given the number of writers who are here and the amount of discussion of writing in all its glory and possibility.  It’s also interesting to watch how the story I’m trying to compose here is changing each time I sit down to put down words.  I think the story has reached a sufficiently stable form and all I need to do now is to finish it, but as part of that process of stabilisation, I have found several variants of the story that might be as interesting as the story I’ve decided to tell.   But this leads into a different topic for another day.

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