More Terrifying Than Foreigners...

Image Source: CarloAlberto.org

Topics: Calculus, Differential Equations, Diversity, Politics

I think someone created a meme on Facebook from this incident. A little poking around the Internet revealed this WaPo article:

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.

Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.

The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her.

She decided to try out some small talk.

Is Syracuse home? She asked.

No, he replied curtly.

He similarly deflected further questions. He appeared laser-focused — perhaps too laser-focused — on the task at hand, those strange scribblings.

Skipping further into the article:

And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Guido Menzio is a recipient of the prestigious Carlo Alberto medal, given to the best Italian economist under 40.

Did I mention he's Italian (not Arab/Near Eastern)? There are myriad other ethnic groups with "swarthy" complexions on the planet. Besides, here in the US, the threat of terrorism statistically may be of the homegrown and non-swarthy variety.

Majoring in a STEM field yields more than its own stereotypes: dorky, nerdy, socially awkward (I'm talking to you, "Big Bang Theory"), unattractive, but TERRORIST? I admit, the course we all affectionately called "DIFFY Qs" was daunting, but it didn't rewire any of us for violence. Have we gotten this addled in the brain?

So, in the era of not wanting actual experts in government or well, ANYTHING; in the era of racism, xenophobia, bombast, blatant lying, homophobia and misogyny as crass, carnival-barking political tactics (applicable when you've subordinated the processes a republic uses selecting its leaders into "reality TV," from a public caricature having more in common with "A Pimp Named Slickback") appealing to our lesser angels, we are SHOCKED that mathematics has literally become "Thoughtcrime"? Instead of a "shining city on a hill," we've become a dung heap infested with maggots in a junkyard - a joke! "Idiocracy" as a comedy was placed 500 years hence. That Apocalypse is now. All the hand-wringing about this being a strange election cycle is now solved. After telling Gorbachev to "tear down that wall," we're apparently intent on building another more lasting monument in the thick mortar paste of breathtaking stupidity. Sadly, the minions of this effort are PROUD of who and what they DON'T know. For them, ignorance is not just bliss: it's a belief system. And, you cannot explain science, mathematics, history, the economy or climate change... to a cult.

Rising xenophobia stoked by the presidential campaign, he (Guido) suggested, may soon make things worse for people who happen to look a little other-ish.

Washington Post:
Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight
Catherine Rampell

Blog break for ten days. Back on 23 May.

Tracking, Calculus and Mozart...

Image Source: Amazon.com, 1990 edition

Topics: Calculus, Cosmos, History, Humor, Research, Science, Scientific Method

Note: Post title derived from the paper by the author as it appeared in Skeptic Magazine (link below).

Louis Liebenberg does a really good job in his work "The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science." The book actually came out three years ago on Amazon, and apparently an earlier version with not much fanfare (and surprisingly, FREE e-book versions at Cyber Tracker, 2nd link below). His premise - and experience learning tracking skills from native foragers - that it was the habits of hunter-gatherers, then and now that caused our brains to reason and develop what we now call science and The Scientific Method. I recall reading in Carl Sagan's Cosmos a similar observation of trackers.

Liebenberg goes a bit deeper into the differentiation between inductive-deductive reasoning and hypothetical-deductive reasoning. The first has to do with direct observations and conclusions from those observations. An example given is "the sun appears to rise in the east, so it must always rise in the east." It is a bit conservative and non-questioning. The hypothetical-deductive poses: "perhaps the Earth is rotating and not the sun moving, and if I were to travel to say, the North Pole, the sun wouldn't appear to move at all." Both are paraphrased quotes from an article I read by the author that appeared on Skeptic Magazine.

It takes nothing away from Ibn al-Haytham and his mighty contribution to The Scientific Method (or Monty Python). It takes nothing from the designers of pyramids in Egypt and the Americas (they just weren't "ancient astronauts" as the fuzzy-haired guy on H2 insists). It's a little expanded from the Ionian settlement (modern day Turkey) originating philosophy that led to debate; logic and the hypothesis of the atom as the smallest division of matter. Also, the author does an excellent job of the interrelation between inductive-deductive and hypothetico-deductive reasoning: one sticks with conventional wisdom and knowledge; the other asks questions and opens itself to debate. It's probably the origins of the combative art of peer review. It may be the reason we feel impelled to explore electronics, music; atoms, quarks and quasars.

All links below are from or relate to the author Louis Liebenberg:

Amazon.com: The Art of Tracking - The Origin of Science
Cyber Tracker: The Origin of Science
Skeptic Magazine:
Tracking Science: The Origin of Scientific Thinking in Our Paleolithic Ancestors

The Limit as it Approaches...

Topics: Bias, Diversity in Science, Education, STEM, Women in Science

This is a re-post from 2012 whose title I didn't quite explain: "the limit as it approaches" is a term in Calculus - helped to co-develop by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz to define The Derivative; Leibniz's impact was Integration. The point of the article in Physics Today I think is still three years hence quite relevant, as well as PT's own Calculus social reference.

South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement

Harvard Theoretical Physicist Dr. Lisa Randall

PHYSICS TODAY: Of all the sciences in the US, physics continues to have the lowest representation of women. Currently, women earn just 21% of bachelor’s degrees and 17% of PhDs in the field. Discourse about women in physics often centers on representation, and the unspoken assumption seems to be that if the representation of women were to increase to some higher level, all would be well. However, the focus on representation obscures important issues and ignores the day-to-day experiences of women physicists.

In fact, women physicists could be the majority in some hypothetical future yet still in their careers experience problems that stem from often unconscious bias. After all, science, and especially physical science, is seen by many cultures as a primarily male domain. But do women actually experience problems in their day-to-day work as physicists? Do they have equal access to opportunities and resources? If not, how does that inequity affect their careers? If harmful, sex-based differences of access exist, then those of us who care about the situation of women in physics need to come up with a solution that encompasses more than just increasing female representation.

I had the pleasure of being educated by Dr. Elvira Williams at North Carolina A and T State University. She was the fourth African American female awarded a PhD in physics in the United States, specifically Condensed Matter-Diffusion Physics, from Howard University (she's third from the bottom of this list). She last taught at Shaw University.

Dr. Elvira Williams: Cambridge Who's Who

I'm proud and honored to have studied General Physics II and Electromagnetic Field Theory from her.

Physics Today: Women in Physics: A Tale of Limits

Mathematical Physics...

Physics Database: In this course from the Perimeter Institute Carl Bender introduces the basics of mathematical physics. The covered topics include: perturbation theory, asymptotics, Schrodinger equation, Shanks transform, eigenvalue problems, Euler summation, divergent series and others. For more physics lectures check out our lecture page.

Calculus of Fly Balls...

You just didn't know you were doing it. Baseball season is coming...

World Science Festival: The Calculus of Catching Fly Balls

Something to Brighten Your Day...

I did these notes for my son, who's taking Calculus for the first time. I don't think I could get away with this poster in a high school classroom. However, he's in college, and to make him pay attention (and frankly laugh-out-loud), here in the education vernacular is my "hook":

How I feel when I pay my cell phone bill...FunnyMotivationalPosters

...And, he did just that!

So, forgive me if my English is glib and my illustrations are pithy and humorous. I'll even say my problem is probably not the best example, but I had fun as a nerd dad, trying to explain a first level Calculus class before the semester starts.

Besides, it's Friday the 13^th. Live a little...
Calculus Notes for Jonathan