INNOVATION: Is There a Crisis in Computer-Science Education?

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Furthermore, to focus only on computer-science majors misses a larger point. As Ms. Raja argues in her essay, simply teaching kids how to code shouldn’t be the only goal. Just as important—or perhaps more so—is teaching kids how to think like a computer programmer—what is called “computational thinking.” She highlights some current efforts to teach computational thinking in elementary and secondary schools, particularly to girls and members of minority groups, who remain woefully underrepresented among computer-science degree-holders and professional computer programmers.

And while teaching computational thinking may result in more computer-science degrees, the more important contribution it will make is giving more people across all fields the ability to solve problems like a computer scientist and to speak the language of computer programming.

As Ms. Raja notes, those are skills everyone should have access to, regardless of their major.

Pizza, Panini and the Periodic Table

Breaking out of the long break in blogging with a link to this article in Swarajya magazine. Subhash Kak in Swarajya:

Mendeleev was born at Tobolsk, Siberia, and educated in St. Petersburg. He was appointed to a professorship in St. Petersburg 1863 and in 1866 he succeeded to the Chair of Chemistry in the University. He is best known for his work on the periodic table, which was soon recognized since he predicted the existence and properties of new elements and indicated that some accepted atomic weights of the then known elements were in error. His periodic table formulated in 1869 remains one of the major conceptual advancements in the history of science.

Mendeleev arranged in the table the 63 known elements based on atomic weight, which he published in his article “On the Relationship of the Properties of the Elements to their Atomic Weights”. He left space for new elements, and predicted three yet-to-be-discovered elements including eka-silicon and eka-boron. The earlier attempts at classification had considered some two-dimensional schemes, but they remained arbitrary in their conception. Mendeleev’s main contribution was his insistence that the two-dimensional should be systematic and comprehensive. In this he appears to have been inspired by the systematic arrangement of Sanskrit sounds in the standard akṣara-mālā, which he indirectly acknowledges in his naming scheme.

A slice of pizza for anyone who comes up with another fine article like this is being proposed (due to the impracticality of sending pizza over long distances, this is still at a proposal stage. ;)) Pizza, anyone?

INNOVATION: Spin designers

Via MIT News:

Computers are basically machines that process information in the form of electronic zeros and ones. But two MIT professors of materials science and engineering are trying to change that. 

Caroline Ross and Geoffrey Beach are members of the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Architectures (C-SPIN), a University of Minnesota-led team of 32 professors (and over 100 graduate students and postdocs) from 18 universities trying to restructure computers from the bottom up. C-SPIN researchers want to use the “spin” of electrons on nanomagnets — rather than electric charge — to encode zeros and ones. If they are successful, the computers of 2025 could be 10 times faster than today’s computers, while using only 1 percent of their energy.

INNOVATION: Doing more with less: Steering a quantum path to improved internet security

Via EurekaAlert.org:

Research conducted at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, may lead to greatly improved security of information transfer over the internet. 

In a paper published in the online journal Nature Communications, physicists from Griffith's Centre for Quantum Dynamics demonstrate the potential for "quantum steering" to be used to enhance data security over long distances, discourage hackers and eavesdroppers and resolve issues of trust with communication devices. 

"Quantum physics promises the possibility of absolutely secure information transfer, where your credit card details or other personal data sent over the internet could be completely isolated from hackers," says project leader Professor Geoff Pryde.

Our very own Krishnan Shankar on Three Quarks Daily!

Research from our very own Krishnan Shankar is now on Three Quarks Daily. Check it out! Here's the link.

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 The mathematics of the everyday is often surprisingly deep and difficult. John Conway famously uses the departmental lounge of the Princeton mathematics department as his office. He claims to spend his days playing games and doing nothing with whomever happens to be in the lounge, but his conversations about seemingly mundane questions has led to no end of delightful and deep mathematics. Chatting with math folks about the everyday can quickly lead to undiscovered country.

A much loved tradition among any group of mathematicians is talking math in the department lounge at afternoon tea. Nearly every department has such a tea. Some are once a week, some every day. There may or may not be cookies. What is certain, though, is that everyone from the retired emeriti to undergraduate students are welcome to stop by for a revitalizing beverage and a chat. More often than not it leads to talk about interesting math. You can begin to imagine why John Conway hangs out in the Princeton math lounge and Alfréd Rényi joked "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems" [1].

You might think the conversation swirls around the work of the latest winners of the Abel prize or folks trying to impress by describing the deep results of their morning's efforts. There is some of that. But just as often the conversation turns into an energetic discussion about the mathematics of the everyday. Several years ago I was involved in a heated discussion about whether or not the election laws of the State of Georgia could allow for a certain local election to become caught in an endless loop of runoff votes. The local media's description of the electoral rules seemed to allow this absurdity. Of course the argument could easily be resolved with a quick Google search, but where's the fun in that? A search was done, but not until all possible scenarios were thoroughly thrashed out and a nickel wagered.

My colleagues, Kimball Martin and Ravi Shankar, asked themselves an innocuous tea-time question: "How often should you clean your room?" Easy to ask, the question is surprisingly difficult to solve. In math problems come in three flavors: so easy as to be not very interesting, so hard as to be unsolvable, and the sweet spot in the middle where the questions are both interesting and solvable. When to clean your room turns out to be a question of the third kind.

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Issue

Folks, we are running into issues with blogging on the other blog http://askthedelphicoracle.blogspot.com/.

Also, there is a chance that we might lose access to that blog -- you never know what could happen in the future. So, we will double-post every post from here onwards.

(Update: March 12, 2019: the reason I titled this post "Issue" is for a reason. Inside joke.)

My current blogging

My blogging activities have moved to the "Ask the Delphic Oracle" blog. I update that blog quite frequently (~75 posts this year so far). The URL for the blog is : http://askthedelphicoracle.blogspot.com. I have created a second placeholder blog. It is at : http://askdo.blogspot.com. The placeholder blog simply redirects to the "Ask the Delphic Oracle" blog. You can subscribe to the blog's feed at : http://askthedelphicoracle.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss 

Panini and Eurocentricity

A followup on the "Pizza and Panini" piece. The "Pizza and Panini" piece is a sly comment on the Eurocentricity of the way we view contributions to science by the ancient Greeks versus the ancient Indians. Panini was, in my opinion, one of the greatest innovators in the ancient world. His grammar was the world's first formal system of language. Panini's ideas of formal rules in natural languages, in fact, significantly influenced the 19th and 20th century linguists who came after him - de Saussure's work (de Saussure,1894) and Chomsky's (Chomsky, 1957).

I am also poking a bit of fun at the lengthiness of some of the works of the ancient Greek mathematicians, scientists and even philosophers. Many of their dialogues appear unnecessary lengthy when viewed by us today. This is because the ancient Greeks had not yet developed the theories of languages, physics, et cetera that were developed after the European Enlightenment. If Euclid's propositions were analyzed today, we would find that they could have been written far more compactly. Two examples follow. The stuff in italics is all that would have been required for a Proof or Algorithm for the two Propositions of Euclid that I deal with below.

Pizza and Panini

PIZZA AND PANINI

This piece is in collaboration with Prof. Krishnan Shankar, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oklahoma. 

The Oracle Asks 

The Sanskrit grammarian Panini is at his friend Socrates’ place in Athens.

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Boy. Here is the tea.

Socrates. Thank you.

Panini. The boy, he understands Greek Mathematics, does he not?



Socrates. Yes, indeed; he was born in the house.



Panini. Can you talk to him about mathematics?

Soc. Certainly. Attend now to the questions which I ask him, and observe whether he learns of me or only remembers.

 

Must Watch : Ask the Delphic Oracle3

We have the third in the series for our column at the Times of India up. It is a short post with a video at the end. An edited version of the post is below. You don't need to know advanced mathematics to enjoy the video, so go ahead and press play!

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Two contestants, one pot of money to win.

A British gameshow called "Golden Balls" invites contestants to play a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, wherein the two contestants have to decide whether they're going to "split" or "steal" a pot of money.

If they both opt to split, they split the money. If one opts to split, and one opts to steal, the one who steals it gets the whole pot. And if they both opt to steal it, then neither get the money.

Prisoner's Dilemma is a classic game from game theory. What happens next? You've got to watch this.