6 ms·

Off topic, but, do you blog? This comment led me to quickly read some of your priors (something I rarely do) and you have some good stories/experiences. Kinda b

Off topic, but, do you blog? This comment led me to quickly read some of your priors (something I rarely do) and you have some good stories/experiences. Kinda blog I’d like reading

Syzygies 6y ago
Thank you? The place I pontificate the most, where I understand my audience, is the Komodo Kamado forum (the best ceramic BBQ made, by Art Linkletter's grandson who I've come to know): https://komodokamadoforum.com/profile/249-syzygies/ https://komodokamadoforum.com/profile/249-syzygies/ I'm known there for a "smoke pot" system for controlling smoke, and doing the math on creating steam for bread. As a mathematician, I'm best known for my "seven shuffles" card shuffling work with Persi Diaconis, the computer algebra system "Macaulay" (too much C code), and being the math consultant for "A Beautiful Mind". I really shouldn't blog. I'm still trying to come up with an understandable proof of the Poincare Conjecture.
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  A Beautiful Mind was a great movie, congrats for participating in such a nice contribution to popular culture. Do you write on window glass? ;)
  - Syzygies 6y ago
    Yes. I was Russell Crowe's hand double. If it wasn't his head showing it was me. He got the idea of acrylic nails to make his (our) hands longer like Nash. I'd be out in the village drinking with friends, and they'd point out my hands, describing the story. No one bought it. Then I'd say I was a Barbra Streisand impersonator. That I could sell, there was probably one in every bar down the street. I got my nails done at the same NJ salon that Edie Falco used for the Sopranos. The woman who had promised to do the work was on a Caribbean cruise, so she phoned in. She asked me if I was doing anything else on the film besides being Russell's hand double? I told her I was also his love double. "Will you be needing an extension for that too?"
    - arthurcolle 6y ago
      What a delightful anecdote! Such a rich set of experiences. Is your last name also the name of a major German pharma corp? > I told her I was also his love double. In stitches right now. Did you get to hang out with Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly? Must be fun being a celeb :D EDIT: you are in the pen ceremony as well! Wow I need to rewatch this urgently, it's definitely one of my favorite movies and I'll be on the lookout for the cameo :) EDIT: I was born in 1992, watched it in theaters when I was 9. Time flies.
    - leephillips 6y ago
      Not often an HN comment makes me laugh out loud.
      - arthurcolle 6y ago
        I wonder/hope (if) it is real
        Syzygies 6y ago
        https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/11/a-beautiful-hand https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/11/a-beautiful-ha...
        flyinglizard 6y ago
        That's a rabbit hole I'm happy to traverse.
        Syzygies 6y ago
        Akiva Goldsman's instruction to me was to have Nash make gradual progress on the Riemann hypothesis, after he emerged from hospitalization. This isn't historically correct, but the film is a fictionalized account. That's challenging; most mathematicians only have experience with fiction writing for for grant proposals. For the library scene late in the film, Nash is starting to make sense. I consulted with a few people actually thinking about the Riemann hypothesis. ("Working" on it is staring into the sun.) For those blackboards, they advised me to borrow from Pierre Deligne's work in characteristic p. I made sure that missing definitions prevented anyone from actually proving the boards were wrong. "Freeze-framing the DVD" was a stock phrase for us on the set, but in fact people mostly paid attention to the acting. As a first year graduate student, I was struck by the similarities between covering spaces in my topology course and field extensions in my algebra course. Asking Barry Mazur in the hallway, he quite mystically intoned that everything is connected. That was the basis for the student approaching Nash in the library. Russell Crowe completely winged his long response at the table. I was seriously impressed. Earlier, I got pilloried by some for the Harvard Lecture Hall scene where Nash is institutionalized. Hey, it comes with the territory. Nash associating spacetime with the quaternions? Brian Greene gave me such a great look when I tried this line on him that I knew we had to use it. It is crazy, and the scene required crazy. Nevertheless, complex quaternions can model geometries used in physics. The quaternions and octonions extend the complex numbers, one could look there to better understand the Riemann hypothesis. The quaternions are most famously used by game developers for efficient rotations, and one keeps seeing references (here on HN!) to the octonions as deeper. I was at a tech dinner party in Berkeley where various gamers including the founder of Second Life swarmed me to share a moment "Oh! The octonions!" For the porch scene in question, where Nash is still pretty gorped, I had him playing with a visual notation for continued fractions. The Riemann zeta function doesn't even converge where one wants to understand its zeros. Continued fractions exhibit different convergence properties, somewhat like the light cast in a a park with trees. So I could imagine a gorped Nash obsessing on continued fractions.
  - billfruit 6y ago
    The movie did receive much flak for taking too much creative liberties with Sylvia Nasser's book, and being too much of a Hollywood Conspiracy film.
- sjcsjc 6y ago
  and being the math consultant for "A Beautiful Mind" I love Hacker News
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Maybe you should blog. I love your writing, here and in past comments. By the way, curious about your reference to Italy and wine in the above comment. I'm from Italy and thought you could be from there, or at least had an experience in Italy.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Syzygies 6y ago
    I've probably lived there six months, in pieces. I love the islands off Sicily.
- ak217 6y ago
  This is the most beautiful thread I've read on Hacker News. Thank you.
athriren 6y ago
thank you for commenting this, it lead to an amazing thread.

Off topic, but, do you blog? This comment led me to quickly read some of your priors (something I rarely do) and you have some good stories/experiences. Kinda blog I’d like reading

Syzygies 6y ago

Thank you? The place I pontificate the most, where I understand my audience, is the Komodo Kamado forum (the best ceramic BBQ made, by Art Linkletter's grandson who I've come to know): https://komodokamadoforum.com/profile/249-syzygies/ https://komodokamadoforum.com/profile/249-syzygies/ I'm known there for a "smoke pot" system for controlling smoke, and doing the math on creating steam for bread. As a mathematician, I'm best known for my "seven shuffles" card shuffling work with Persi Diaconis, the computer algebra system "Macaulay" (too much C code), and being the math consultant for "A Beautiful Mind". I really shouldn't blog. I'm still trying to come up with an understandable proof of the Poincare Conjecture.

arthurcolle 6y ago
A Beautiful Mind was a great movie, congrats for participating in such a nice contribution to popular culture. Do you write on window glass? ;)
- Syzygies 6y ago
  Yes. I was Russell Crowe's hand double. If it wasn't his head showing it was me. He got the idea of acrylic nails to make his (our) hands longer like Nash. I'd be out in the village drinking with friends, and they'd point out my hands, describing the story. No one bought it. Then I'd say I was a Barbra Streisand impersonator. That I could sell, there was probably one in every bar down the street. I got my nails done at the same NJ salon that Edie Falco used for the Sopranos. The woman who had promised to do the work was on a Caribbean cruise, so she phoned in. She asked me if I was doing anything else on the film besides being Russell's hand double? I told her I was also his love double. "Will you be needing an extension for that too?"
  - arthurcolle 6y ago
    What a delightful anecdote! Such a rich set of experiences. Is your last name also the name of a major German pharma corp? > I told her I was also his love double. In stitches right now. Did you get to hang out with Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly? Must be fun being a celeb :D EDIT: you are in the pen ceremony as well! Wow I need to rewatch this urgently, it's definitely one of my favorite movies and I'll be on the lookout for the cameo :) EDIT: I was born in 1992, watched it in theaters when I was 9. Time flies.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Not often an HN comment makes me laugh out loud.
    - arthurcolle 6y ago
      I wonder/hope (if) it is real
      - Syzygies 6y ago
        https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/11/a-beautiful-hand https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/11/a-beautiful-ha...
        flyinglizard 6y ago
        That's a rabbit hole I'm happy to traverse.
        Syzygies 6y ago
        Akiva Goldsman's instruction to me was to have Nash make gradual progress on the Riemann hypothesis, after he emerged from hospitalization. This isn't historically correct, but the film is a fictionalized account. That's challenging; most mathematicians only have experience with fiction writing for for grant proposals. For the library scene late in the film, Nash is starting to make sense. I consulted with a few people actually thinking about the Riemann hypothesis. ("Working" on it is staring into the sun.) For those blackboards, they advised me to borrow from Pierre Deligne's work in characteristic p. I made sure that missing definitions prevented anyone from actually proving the boards were wrong. "Freeze-framing the DVD" was a stock phrase for us on the set, but in fact people mostly paid attention to the acting. As a first year graduate student, I was struck by the similarities between covering spaces in my topology course and field extensions in my algebra course. Asking Barry Mazur in the hallway, he quite mystically intoned that everything is connected. That was the basis for the student approaching Nash in the library. Russell Crowe completely winged his long response at the table. I was seriously impressed. Earlier, I got pilloried by some for the Harvard Lecture Hall scene where Nash is institutionalized. Hey, it comes with the territory. Nash associating spacetime with the quaternions? Brian Greene gave me such a great look when I tried this line on him that I knew we had to use it. It is crazy, and the scene required crazy. Nevertheless, complex quaternions can model geometries used in physics. The quaternions and octonions extend the complex numbers, one could look there to better understand the Riemann hypothesis. The quaternions are most famously used by game developers for efficient rotations, and one keeps seeing references (here on HN!) to the octonions as deeper. I was at a tech dinner party in Berkeley where various gamers including the founder of Second Life swarmed me to share a moment "Oh! The octonions!" For the porch scene in question, where Nash is still pretty gorped, I had him playing with a visual notation for continued fractions. The Riemann zeta function doesn't even converge where one wants to understand its zeros. Continued fractions exhibit different convergence properties, somewhat like the light cast in a a park with trees. So I could imagine a gorped Nash obsessing on continued fractions.
- billfruit 6y ago
  The movie did receive much flak for taking too much creative liberties with Sylvia Nasser's book, and being too much of a Hollywood Conspiracy film.
sjcsjc 6y ago
and being the math consultant for "A Beautiful Mind" I love Hacker News
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Maybe you should blog. I love your writing, here and in past comments. By the way, curious about your reference to Italy and wine in the above comment. I'm from Italy and thought you could be from there, or at least had an experience in Italy.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Syzygies 6y ago
  I've probably lived there six months, in pieces. I love the islands off Sicily.
ak217 6y ago
This is the most beautiful thread I've read on Hacker News. Thank you.

athriren 6y ago

thank you for commenting this, it lead to an amazing thread.