The Unthinkable

It wants the grandest place
– the heavenly –
albeit not on the horizon,
neither between here and there
nor before, nor beside, nor behind
the borders of space.

Remain neutral
– this is the outline –
supple shell,
neither root nor egg,
moveable therefore, adaptable,
in the anonymous,
what is without reference,
mass in the department store,
at the railway station,
at the aerospace installation,
in the trail of automobiles
along the highway,
(anthropology of supermodernism)
in the bustle,
in haste,
globalising,
in motionless speed,
now, yonder, elsewhere,
circling information
everywhere and simultaneously, worldwide,
without coercion,
without necessity,
without a destination,
eroded knowledge,
fractured power,
indifferent,
free.

by Albert Bontridder
from Wonen in de vloed
publisher: Poëziecentrum, Gent, 2012
translation: 2012, Willem Groenewegen

Moises Velasquez-Manoff in Nautilus:

You probably try to exercise regularly and eat right. Perhaps you steer toward “superfoods,” fruits, nuts, and vegetables advertised as “antioxidant,” which combat the nasty effects of oxidation in our bodies. Maybe you take vitamins to protect against “free radicals,” destructive molecules that arise normally as our cells burn fuel for energy, but which may damage DNA and contribute to cancer, dementia, and the gradual meltdown we call aging.

Warding off the diseases of aging is certainly a worthwhile pursuit. But evidence has mounted to suggest that antioxidant vitamin supplements, long assumed to improve health, are ineffectual. Fruits and vegetables are indeed healthful but not necessarily because they shield you from oxidative stress. In fact, they may improve health for quite the opposite reason: They stress you.

That stress comes courtesy of trace amounts of naturally occurring pesticides and anti-grazing compounds. You already know these substances as the hot flavors in spices, the mouth-puckering tannins in wines, or the stink of Brussels sprouts. They are the antibacterials, antifungals, and grazing deterrents of the plant world. In the right amount, these slightly noxious substances, which help plants survive, may leave you stronger.

Parallel studies, meanwhile, have undercut decades-old assumptions about the dangers of free radicals. Rather than killing us, these volatile molecules, in the right amount, may improve our health. Our quest to neutralize them with antioxidant supplements may be doing more harm than good.

More here.

Oliver Morton in More Intelligent Life:

It will be the most far-flung rendezvous in history—and the end of the most taxing uphill trip ever made. On Bastille Day 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spaceprobe will reach Pluto after a slog of more than 5 billion kilometres, with the sun’s gravity pulling against it every step of the way. That such a trip is possible at all is remarkable. That it could be managed in less than a decade is a tribute both to the most brute force and the most subtle calculation. First the force. As interplanetary missions go, this is a small one, weighing half a tonne. But when it was launched in January 2006, it was sitting on top of one of America’s largest rockets, an Atlas V. The launcher burned more than a tonne of rocket fuel and oxygen for every kilo of the craft’s mass. As a result New Horizons headed off to Pluto faster than any previous space mission: 45km a second. Puck boasted that he could put a girdle round the Earth in 40 minutes. At that rate New Horizons could have done it in 14. The need for speed was simple; as the probe headed to the solar system’s outer edge, the centring sun pulled it back. Its gravity was not so strong as to bring the spacecraft to a halt—New Horizons will be the fifth human spacecraft to leave the system entirely—but it was enough to slow it down, draining away the kinetic energy the mighty Atlas had given it at lift-off day by day. By the time it reached Jupiter, about a year later, New Horizons had lost more than half its initial speed.

This is where the cleverness came in. Jupiter did not just provide a target on which New Horizons could test its cameras and other instruments. It also sped it back up. This pick-me-up, known as a gravity-assist manoeuvre, knocked five years off the time taken to get to Pluto. And unlike the Earth-shaking, sky-splitting $200m-or-more expense of an Atlas launch, it needed no fuel and no money. Gravity assists are a beautiful example of the conservation of momentum, one of the most fundamental ideas of Newtonian mechanics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When a spacecraft swings past a planet, the pull of the planet’s gravity changes its momentum so that it ends up moving not just in a different direction, but also faster than before.

More here.

Mark A. Rubin in Nature:

Ten months ago, the physicians of a feisty 76-year-old sales clerk from New Jersey who had an advanced carcinoma in her urinary tract decided to try an unconventional therapy. A few weeks earlier, they had sent a sample of her tumour to my team at the Institute of Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Genetic sequencing had revealed that she had more copies than usual of the HER2 gene (also known as ERBB2). After years of failure with the usual arsenal of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, the physicians included the drug Herceptin (trastuzumab) in the woman's treatment. Herceptin is more commonly used for breast cancer, but it targets the HER2 mutation. Since taking the drug, she has been free of disease.

Advances in sequencing have dramatically increased the likelihood of discovering mutations that drive tumour growth in certain people and in certain tumours — even in specific cells within tumours. Yet mountains of genomic data are accumulating that are of little use because they are not tied to clinical information, such as family medical history. What is more, genomic data are generally confined to documents that cannot easily be searched, shared or even understood by most physicians. To achieve the level of success in precision medicine for cancer care that US President Barack Obama and others are anticipating, sequence data needs to be linked, in real time, to the patient sitting in front of his or her doctor. Integrated genomic and clinical data will also need to be available, in a searchable way, to a broad community of practitioners and researchers. Prototypes for centralized data banks are showing promise, but serious and sustained investment is needed to scale them up. Clinicians are used to appraising 20–50 measurements from routine laboratory tests, such as for blood-sugar levels. Such data can be easily entered into patients' electronic health records. Genomic data introduces a whole new level of complexity. To give an idea of the scale, it would take more than 25 days to transfer from one computer server to another the 2.5 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes) of data generated by The Cancer Genome Atlas — a US project started in 2005 to catalogue the mutations that drive cancer. This is according to my colleague Toby Bloom, deputy director for informatics at the New York Genome Center, a consortium that specializes in large-scale human genome sequencing.

More here.

Alexis C. Madrigal in Fusion:

A protest group pulled off an undeniably futuristic stunt this weekend in Spain: they sent thousands of holograms parading past the lower house of the country’s parliament.

The augmented reality protest was just the latest in activist groups’ campaign against a series of “citizen security” bills, which received final passage in March. The new laws criminalize some forms of protest, such as gathering in front of Parliament. And among highly restrictive digital provisions, the law makes taking or distributing “unauthorized” photographs of police a crime punishable with a 30,000 euro fine. All in, the laws would create 45 new infractions, mostly centered on cracking down on dissent.

The new measures will go into effect July 1, if they survive national and European legal challenges.

No Somos Delito, which translates as We Are Not Crime, has been protesting what they call the country’s “gag law,” and in that context, the hologram protest is more than the stunt it might first appear. Under conditions in which people cannot put their bodies into the streets, the ghostly virtual projections serve both as protest and as a reminder of the protests that cannot occur.

More here.

Nathaniel Popkin at Public Books:

How to Be Both, the sixth novel by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, is an astounding work of art, so exquisite in its composition that reading it feels like staring into a Decadent painting, bound and endless all at once. This feeling is both the product of the book’s composition and simultaneously its silky essence. Depending on the version the reader has in her hands, she will start, either as I did, with the chatty ghost of Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa (1435/6–1477/8), landed back on earth in the winter of 2014 in a room with 16-year-old George, whose mother has just died, or with George a few months previous, driving in Ferrara, Italy, with her mother and brother to see del Cossa’s greatest work. The book is about the duality of sexuality and of existence in general, a theme reinforced by the publisher’s decision to print two versions, reversing the order of the two interrelated but distinct parts. Most profoundly, How to Be Both depicts the power of art to produce within art maker and art observer alike capacities we don’t always realize are already there.

“Is there spring in purgatorium?,” purrs del Cossa’s ghost while standing in the place he has landed, room 55 of the National Gallery in London, where his painting Saint Vincent Ferrer hangs. A boy stands before the painting; Francesco can tell that the boy, really the girl George, “faces a door he can’t pass through.”

more here.

Michael Hofmann at the Times Literary Supplement:

Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t. The manuscript was the principal casualty of a fire on June 7, 1944 that destroyed the Lowrys’ beach shack outside Vancouver (from which the endlessly revised and near-perfect Under the Volcano was mercifully retrieved), and it was long supposed that all that was left of it were a few perfectly round pieces of charred typescript – like paper portholes – some of them oddly, but inescapably for the accident- and coincidence-obsessed Lowry (“The Element Follows You Around, Sir”), on the subject of fire. That, and the title.

It turns out, however, that in an access of prudence, Lowry had deposited the carbon of an early version of In Ballast in New York City in 1936 (where it had already done the rounds of publishers), with the mother of Jan Gabrial, his first wife, before setting off with Gabrial for Mexico. Mexico did for the marriage, and very nearly for Lowry as well, but it gave him the germ of Under the Volcano (originally a highly technical short story, about a Consul and his daughter witnessing a murder on a Mexican bus); in the end, after twenty months, he retreated to Los Angeles, met and married his second wife, Margerie Bonner, and struck north for Canada, where the couple lived on next to no money in conditions of extreme simplicity. There he continued to work on Under the Volcano and In Ballast pretty much in tandem.

more here.

An excerpt from Anne Serling's book at berfrois:

Shortly after Julie and Rhoda leave, my dad drives back to his hometown in Binghamton, New York—a small, once bucolic city in upstate New York where down a tree-lined street there stands a white, two-story house with dark shutters. It isn’t difficult to find; head down Front Street, straight onto Riverside Drive, right on Beethoven Street, then two blocks and you’re there.

This is a pilgrimage my father takes every summer until his death. It is 1965. He is forty years old. In ten years he will be gone.

He starts the car and waits as we call, “Good-bye.” He is going back, he says, “just for a few hours,” and leaning out of the car window, waves. His paratrooper bracelet glints in the sun. I listen as the car’s tires crunch through the gravel road of our cottage. I watch him go.

I imagine him driving slowly down Bennett Avenue, his old street, and passing by his house, now slightly in need of painting, a little worse for wear. I wonder if, stopping briefly, he pictures his mother still there, opening the front door, seeing him suddenly, a vision she cannot quite be certain of, holding up her hand to block the afternoon sun. Or maybe it is his father he sees out in the driveway, washing the old Ford, suddenly dropping the hose, which snakes through the air, spraying memories my dad can almost touch as he imagines both his parents running toward him in a kind of dreamlike, slow-motion reverie that only this level of recall can recreate.

more here.

Christopher Clark at the London Review of Books:

In January 1904, King Leopold II of Belgium was invited to Berlin to attend a birthday dinner for Kaiser Wilhelm II. The two monarchs were seated next to each other and everything was going nicely until the Kaiser suddenly brought up the question of a possible future French attack on Germany. In the event of a war between Germany and France, Wilhelm explained, he would expect the Belgians to side with Germany. So long as they agreed, he would see to it personally that Belgium was rewarded after the conclusion of hostilities with territories annexed from northern France. Leopold himself, he added, warming to his theme, could expect to be rewarded with ‘the Crown of Old Burgundy’. When the king of the Belgians, unsettled by these speculations, countered that the ministers and parliament of his country were hardly likely to approve of such far-flung plans, Wilhelm became flustered. He couldn’t respect a king, he said, who felt himself answerable to ministers and parliament rather than to God alone. ‘I will not be trifled with!’ he snapped. ‘As a soldier, I belong to the school of Frederick the Great, to the school of Napoleon. If Belgium does not go with me, I will be guided solely by strategic considerations.’ Leopold is reported to have been so upset by the exchange that, on rising from the table, he put his helmet on backwards.

Samira Shackle in New Hummanist:

Penicillin

Perhaps the most famous accidental discovery of all is penicillin, a group of antibiotics used to combat bacterial infections. In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming took a break from his lab work investigating staphylococci and went on holiday. When he returned, he found that one Petri dish had been left open, and a blue-green mould had formed. This fungus had killed off all surrounding bacteria in the culture. The mould contained a powerful antibiotic, penicillin, that could kill harmful bacteria without having a toxic effect on the human body. At the time, Fleming’s findings didn’t garner much scientific attention. In fact, it took another decade before this drug was available for use in humans. Retrospectively, Fleming’s chance discovery has been credited as the moment when modern medicine was born.

Pulsars

In 1967, astronomy graduate student Jocelyn Bell noticed a strange “bit of scruff” coming from her radio telescope. It was a regular signal coming from the same patch of sky, of a type that no known natural sources would produce. Bell and her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, ruled out sources of human interference – other researchers, television signals, satellites. None explained the signal, and the scientists wondered if they had detected a sign from aliens. This was ruled out when another was located in a different part of the sky: it seemed unlikely that two sets of aliens would simultaneously be trying to communicate with Earth. In fact, it was the first discovery of a pulsar (pulsating radio star), a highly magnetised, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation. Pulsars, which had been predicted three decades earlier but had never been actually observed, indirectly confirm the existence of gravitational radiation.

More here.

Slava Gerovitch in Nautilus:

Here was a target that checked the ideological boxes. In May of 1950 Boris Agapov, the science editor of the Soviet Literary Gazette, penned a scornful critique of the American public’s fascination with “thinking machines.” He scoffed at the capitalist’s “sweet dream” of replacing class-conscious workers and human soldiers—who could choose not to fight for the bourgeoisie—with obedient robots. He mocked the idea of using computers for processing economic information and lampooned American businessmen who “love information [like] American patients love patented pills.” He poured contempt on the Western prophets of the information age, especially the most prominent of them—cybernetics creator Norbert Wiener, a mathematics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cybernetics, which was then just a couple of years old, declared that control and communication mechanisms in biology, technology, and society were fundamentally the same.

Philosophers chimed in, bashing cybernetics for “clinging to the decrepit remnants of idealistic philosophy,” as well as for being “mechanistic” in reducing the activity of the human brain to “mechanical connection and signaling.” Cybernetics, they claimed, was doubly guilty. It deviated from dialectical materialism, the official Soviet philosophy of science, in two opposite directions—toward idealism and toward mechanicism—at the same time. The media portrayed it as both “idealistic” and “mechanistic,” “utopian” and “dystopian,” “technocratic” and “pessimistic,” a “pseudo-science” and a dangerous weapon of Western military aggression. Soviet critics ignored, or possibly were unaware of, Wiener’s openly pacifist stand, which he had taken after Hiroshima, and his refusal to participate in military research.

…The trouble with these public attacks against the use of computers was, of course, that the country desperately needed computers. The military, in particular, recognized the value of the nascent technology, and the risks of being left behind.

So, in a classic example of “doublespeak,” the Soviet Union began to secretly pursue military computing while condemning the West for doing the same. While the press ridiculed American “fantasies” of robots giving military orders, Sergei Sobolev, the chief mathematician of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, tirelessly promoted the development of new computers. These included the Soviet Union’s first computer, the MESM, and its first small computer, the M-1.

Read the full article here.

Mallory Ortberg in The Toast:

• A woman can forgive a man for anything, except for having freckles or a weak chin
• 100% of women want to have sex with a man who embodies the fox version of Robin Hood from the cartoon Robin Hood, but most do not actually want to have sex with a fox or a man dressed as one
• It’s not enough to have a lot of hair falling in your eyes; men must be constantly tugging at their own hair in exasperation or at the very least running their hands through it as they think carefully about art or something
• Men should have a TON of money but not care about it for even a SECOND, he should literally forget he even has money, he should whisk you away on a helicopter and then when you try to tip the pilot in cash he’s like “what are those weird little flat green dudes in your wallet?” because he doesn’t care about money at all even though he has so much of it

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands

On some standard computer-vision tasks, short programs — less than 50 lines long — written in a probabilistic programming language are competitive with conventional systems with thousands of lines of code, MIT researchers have found. Most recent advances in artificial intelligence — such as mobile apps that convert speech to text — are the result of machine learning, in which computers are turned loose on huge data sets to look for patterns. To make machine-learning applications easier to build, computer scientists have begun developing so-called probabilistic programming languages, which let researchers mix and match machine-learning techniques that have worked well in other contexts. In 2013, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a four-year program to fund probabilistic-programming research. “This is the first time that we’re introducing probabilistic programming in the vision area,” says Tejas Kulkarni, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences and first author on the new paper. “The whole hope is to write very flexible models, both generative and discriminative models, as short probabilistic code, and then not do anything else. General-purpose inference schemes solve the problems.”

By the standards of conventional computer programs, those “models” can seem absurdly vague. One of the tasks that the researchers investigate, for instance, is constructing a 3-D model of a human face from 2-D images. Their program describes the principal features of the face as being two symmetrically distributed objects (eyes) with two more centrally positioned objects beneath them (the nose and mouth). It requires a little work to translate that description into the syntax of the probabilistic programming language, but at that point, the model is complete. Feed the program enough examples of 2D images and their corresponding 3D models, and it will figure out the rest for itself. “When you think about probabilistic programs, you think very intuitively when you’re modeling,” Kulkarni says. “You don’t think mathematically. It’s a very different style of modeling.”

More here.

Erica Klarreich in Quanta [h/t: Jennifer Ouellette] (image Skip Sterling):

Diaconis’ career as a professional magician began more than five decades ago, when he ran away from home at age 14 to go on the road with the sleight-of-hand virtuoso Dai Vernon. But unlike most magicians, Diaconis eventually found his way into academia, lured by an even more powerful siren song: mathematics. At 24, he started taking college classes to try to learn how to calculate the probabilities behind various gambling games. A few years later he was admitted to Harvard University’s graduate statistics program on the strength of a recommendation letter from the famed mathematics writer Martin Gardner that said, more or less, “This kid invented two of the best ten card tricks in the last decade, so you should give him a chance.”

Now a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford University, Diaconis has employed his intuition about cards, which he calls “the poetry of magic,” in a wide range of settings. Once, for example, he helped decode messages passed between inmates at a California state prison by using small random “shuffles” to gradually improve a decryption key. He has also analyzed Bose-Einstein condensation — in which a collection of ultra-cold atoms coalesces into a single “superatom” — by envisioning the atoms as rows of cards moving around. This makes them “friendly,” said Diaconis, whose speech still carries the inflections of his native New York City. “We all have our own basic images that we translate things into, and for me cards were where I started.”

In 1992, Diaconis famously proved — along with the mathematician Dave Bayer of Columbia University — that it takes about seven ordinary riffle shuffles to randomize a deck. Over the years, Diaconis and his students and colleagues have successfully analyzed the effectiveness of almost every type of shuffle people use in ordinary life.

All except one: “smooshing.”

This toddler-level technique involves spreading the cards out on a table, swishing them around with your hands, and then gathering them up. Smooshing is used in poker tournaments and in baccarat games in Monte Carlo, but no one actually knows how long you need to smoosh a deck to randomize it. “Smooshing is a completely different mechanism from the other shuffles, and my usual techniques don’t fit into that,” Diaconis said. The problem has tantalized him for decades.

More here.

Jill Dehnert reviews's Mohsin Hamid's Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London in The Brooklyn Rail:

While I read Discontent and Its Civilizations, one thought occurred to me over and over again: this book is essential. In the introduction, Hamid says, “I wanted the experience of reading this book to be like developing a relationship.” And at this, he is most successful. The structure of the book is such that we get to know the author and his thoughts on life, art, and politics in a way that mimics the development of a friendship; we learn about his life as a child, how he met his wife, his struggles and successes as a novelist, as well as his opinions on global politics. And because we get to know Hamid, we also come to trust him, to trust his opinions, and to value his view of the world. This is especially effective throughout the third section of the book, “Politics,” where Hamid investigates the failed governmental systems in Pakistan, Asia, and throughout the world.

It is exactly because Hamid has “tried to advocate the blurring of boundaries: not just between civilizations or people of different ‘groups,’ but also between writer and reader,” that Discontent and Its Civilizations feels important and urgent. Each essay seems like we are merely having a conversation with a good friend, and, as with any good conversation there is an element of self-reflection that occurs. So, even though Hamid doesn’t spend too much time directly addressing racial tension in America, I found myself reflecting on our contemporary moment in the United States, where recent racial conflict and upheaval, like Ferguson, have highlighted that we, as a nation, have not come as far as we may have thought. “A country should be judged,” Hamid says, “by how it treats its minorities.” Here he is talking about the gross and often deadly discrimination religious minorities face in Pakistan everyday. But it isn’t hard to imagine how the United States would fare under such scrutiny.

More here.

Crispin Sartwell in the New York Times:

When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s, I played on the intramural softball team of the postmodern literary theorist Stanley Fish. I recall his umpiring at a practice once when the batter, my buddy Mike, now a distinguished professor at Yale, argued a call. Fish good-humoredly pointed out that what’s a ball and what’s a strike is not an objective, external, or natural fact, it’s an interpretive practice; and according to that practice, whatever the umpire calls is real: If he calls it a strike, it’s a strike. (So that was a strike, Mike.)

The next day in class he expanded the ball and strike example into a theory of literary interpretation, and finally of reality: what’s true or false in these areas is what authoritative interpretive communities approve. Law is a practice like this, he said. Philosophy is. Science is.

Over his career, Fish had gone from close readings of “Paradise Lost” to an approach to textual interpretation that made use of French post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida. And by developing the view that truth was a matter of linguistic practice rather than referring to a reality outside of language, he had become one of the spearheads of “postmodernism.”

It was in one of Fish’s seminars that I first read Richard Rorty, another arch-postmodernist who was later my dissertation adviser. Rorty convincingly defended himself against the charge of relativism – I know, having spent hours in his office, trying to make it stick — and yet he maintained that it was useless to talk about the world, or truth. It was ridiculous or impossible, he asserted, to try to describe reality outside of our linguistic practices, to describe it as it would be if it were not being described.

More here.

The Editors at n+1:

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of ceaseless generational analysis. Among certain classes, especially business elites, it is considered a sign of profound insight to speak only in terms of youth and its consumer preferences. The jargon once endemic to Ad Age(which coined the term “Generation Y”) now peppers style sections and business books, earnest organizing meetings and talk shows, such that no one of any age can open a newspaper or a website without reading about the “millennials” — people born between 1982 and 2004 — and their doings, interests, and needs.

It seems not to matter to the proliferation of writing about millennials that so much of it has been internally contradictory. In the year 2000, the sinister David Brooks said that stats suggested the boomers were raising friendly, sociable, and altruistic kids. In 2012, Jean Twenge at the Atlantic retaliated with fresh stats that revealed them to be inveterate narcissists profoundly uninterested in social problems. “Politicians: Millennials Won’t Vote Because They Hate You” declaimed Bloomberg, prompting an older Huffington Post correspondent to wonder ruefully, “Millennials: Why Do They Hate Us?” All this despite evidence that millennials vote in the same numbers as young people of previous generations. Millennials, according to Business Insider, are disaffected with workplace authority and value flexibility, but an IBM study written up in the Washington Post suggests that in this respect, too, millennials are indistinguishable from other generations.

more here.

Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

In 1993, seven years before his death, at the age of eighty-two, Jacob Lawrence recast the title and most of the captions of a stunning suite of sixty small paintings that he had made in 1941. The pictures, in milk-based casein tempera on hardboard, detailed the exodus that began during the First World War of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The original title, “The Migration of the Negro,” became “The Migration Series.” The prolix captions were condensed and clarified, with only five of them left unedited, including the last, a swelling coda to the sequence’s rhythmic montage: “And the migrants kept coming.” Art historians quail at alterations of canonical works, even by their creators. But Lawrence wasn’t working for art history, even if he was making it. He wanted to change the world. A profoundly moving show of all sixty paintings in “The Migration Series” at the Museum of Modern Art—the installation, by the curator Leah Dickerman, includes contemporaneous works by other artists, photographers, musicians, and writers—stirs reflection on the character and the relative success of that aim. The work’s originality calls for a term other than “history painting”: sociology painting, perhaps, which defines not only a bygone era but a deeply conditioned and persistent yet quaking ground of common cultural experience and political consequence. The pictures remain the same. The eyes that behold them—ours—both do and don’t.

more here.

Thomas Lin in The New Yorker:

Cédric Villani’s arrival, one afternoon last May, at a small café off the Champs-Élysées drew glances from a good fraction of the late-lunch crowd. His shoulder-length hair was parted almost symmetrically down the middle, and he wore his usual ensemble: a three-piece pin-striped black suit, a silver pocket watch and chain, a peacock-green cravat (purchased at a costume store for actors), an overstuffed backpack, and, pinned to his lapel like a biological specimen, a custom-made spider brooch. Having just wrapped up a national-radio segment at the station next door, he was stopping for a bite on his way back to the Institut Henri Poincaré, where he serves as director.

Villani has been called the Lady Gaga of French mathematicians. After winning the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, in 2010, for what his award citation called “proofs of nonlinear Landau damping and convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation,” he embraced a role that many other medalists have dreaded—that of mathematical ambassador, hopscotching from event to event and continent to continent, evangelizing for the discipline. “We are the most hidden of all fields,” he told me. “We are the ones who typically interact the least with the outer world. We are also the field which is most emblematic of revulsion in school.” The French filmmaker Olivier Peyon, who first met Villani while shooting his 2013 documentary “Comment J’ai Détesté les Maths” (“How I Came to Hate Math”), says that the mathematician struck him immediately as a natural proselytizer. “He was funny, very—in French, we say pédagogique,” Peyon told me. “He knew how to speak about his art, about math.”

More here.