TITLE: Three Notes for a Friday
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 19, 2007 3:45 PM
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Three thoughts from recent reading. From a professional
standpoint, one is serious, one is light, and one is
visionary. You'll have to decide.
Understanding the New
In their New Yorker article
Manifold Destiny,
on the social drama that surrounded Grigory Perelman's proof
of the Poincaré conjecture, Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber
write:
On September 10, 2004, more than a year after Perelman returned to
St. Petersburg, he received a long e-mail from Tian, who said that
he had just attended a two-week workshop at Princeton devoted to
Perelman's proof. "I think that we have understood the whole
paper," Tian wrote. "It is all right."
Mathematics, the theoretical parts of computer science, and
theoretical physics are different from most other fields of
human knowledge in a way that many folks don't realize.
The seminal advances in these areas create a whole new world.
Even the smartest, most accomplished people in the field may
well not understand this new world until they have invested
a lot of time and effort studying the work.
This should encourage those of us who don't understand a new
idea immediately the first time through.
Dressing the Part
In
Why I Don't Wear a Suit and Can't Figure Out Why Anyone Does!,
America's most X-generation sports owner, Mark Cuban, writes:
Someone had once told me that you wear to work what your customers
wear to work. That seemed to make sense to me, so I followed it,
and expected those who worked for me to follow it as well.
This is good news for college professors. If you believe the
conventional wisdom these days, our customers are our students,
and their dress is the ultimate in casual and comfortable. I
can even wear shorts to class with little concern that my
students will care.
But what about all of our other customers -- parents, the
companies that hire our students, the state government, the
taxpayers? They generally expect something more, but even
still I think that academics are unique among professionals
these days in that almost everyone cuts us slack on how we
dress. Or maybe no one thinks of us as professionals...
Now that I am a department head, I have made adjustments in
how I dress, because my audience really is more than just my
students. I meet with other faculty, higher-level administrators,
and members of the community on a regular basis, and where they
have expectations I try to meet or exceed them. Cuban is
basically right, but you have to think of "customer" in a
broader sense. It is "whoever is buying my immediate product
right now", and your product may change from audience to
audience. The dean and other department heads are consuming
a different product than the students!
Controlling the Present and Future
Courtesy of
James Duncan Davidson,
another quote from Alan Kay that is worth thinking about:
Alan Kay has always encouraged computer scientists to take
ownership of the tools they use. Why should we settle for
the word processor that we are given by the market? Or the
other basic tools of daily computer use, or the operating system,
or the programming languages that we have been handed?
We have the power to create the tools we use.
In Kay's mind, we have the obligation to make
and use something better -- and then to empower the rest of
the users, by giving them better tools and by making it possible
for them to create their own.
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