Bonfils Ngabonziza. Ngabo Seven, 2018.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

I just returned from the joint Vietnam-US math conference held at the International Center for Interdisciplinary Science and Education in beautiful Quy Nhon, Vietnam.

While it is a human endeavor, mathematics doesn’t care about gender, race, wealth, or nationality. One of the great pleasures of the math community is finding yourself on common ground with people from around the world. It is for good reason movie aliens usually first communicate using prime numbers and we chose to include math on the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Record  [1].

In this spirit, the American Mathematical Society and the Vietnamese Mathematical Society organized a joint meeting to encourage connections, collaborations, and friendship between the two countries’ mathematical communities. Given the fraught history between the two countries, the importance and symbolism of the conference were especially notable. During the cold war, even innocuous communication between mathematicians on the two sides was quite difficult. Even sending a letter, nevermind a conference to meet in person, was a rare event. More than a few results were discovered independently on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Progress was often held up due to not knowing of the latest advances on the other side. The Soviet Union, for example, made it difficult for its citizens to participate in the International Congress of Mathematicians. In an age where internationalism and science are treated with skepticism, building direct connections between countries’ citizens is a wonderful thing. The conference even made the local evening news!

Another great thing about these sorts of conferences is the breadth of mathematics covered. This meeting covered everything from topology to mathematical physics, from modeling natural gas flows in pipelines to groups and representations (my own area of research). As part of this, the meeting had six plenary talks by eminent mathematicians covering the various fields represented at the conference.

One of the speakers was Henry Cohn, arguably the world expert on sphere packings. Dr. Cohn gave a fantastic talk about the latest breakthroughs in this area. Nearly three years ago here at 3QD we talked about an amazing breakthrough in sphere packing. This included work by Dr. Cohn. As we’ll see, Dr. Cohn and his collaborators haven’t been napping. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

What has happened to music? To the joy of cozying up with your records, tapes, or CDs and your music source, whether it was a boom box, or stereo with faux-wood speakers taller than a small child, or Walkman? It used to be simple to figure out where to buy music and how to listen to it. You went to the local record store, and then you brought it home and absconded to your bedroom, where you cranked your new purchase as loud as you could before your parents knocked on the door and told you to turn it down. There was a spatial aspect to music, as the music store was obviously circumscribed in space, with different sections for different tastes. Listening also usually took place in an intimate setting, layered like a palimpsest with memories of years past. Well before five-disc (and then 100-plus-disc) CD changers, we listened to one album at a time, and usually with the songs in the same order that the artist or the producer intended. It was a form of communion, however illusory, with the musician. There were also visual and tactile elements, as you had something to hold in your hands and pore over–liner notes, album credits, lyrics, glossy pictures of the band members. Did anyone ever vote to relinquish these sensory companions to the music-listening experience?

I did not have access to the ultimate in high fidelity as a kid, and I remember practically gluing my ear to my Sony Dream Machine clock radio’s speaker. When my parents bought me my first “boom box” they managed to find one with only one speaker. It hardly boomed, but it was still more than sufficient. In my mind’s ear, even these devices had much better sound quality than the digital music we have come to rely on. At the source, at least, the sound was fuller, less broken down or compressed into heartless bits and bytes. We did also have a lot of vinyl, not because we were hipsters, but because it was the 1970s.

I can’t pretend that it always makes a difference, today’s lesser sound quality. It was a trade-off that didn’t trouble me for years as I joined the rest of the world in celebrating the fact that virtually my entire music collection could fit on an iPod that I could carry around with me. As years go by, and you simply lose the memory of what music used to sound like, you don’t realize that convenience has supplanted most of the other elements of the experience of listening to music. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

In the first scene of the first episode of “The Wire”, McNulty asks the Corner Boy who witnessed the murder of his friend “Snotboogie”, for stealing the money from the pot in a crap game, why they let Snotboogie play, since he always tried to steal the money. The Corner Boy replies, “Got to. This is America, Man.”

This is America. Everybody gets to play. More than that, everybody gets an equal, or at least a fair, shot. Everybody deserves equal opportunity. Justice itself demands that we strive for equality of fair opportunity. Right?

I’m not sure. But I think not. I think equality of opportunity is a bad idea – all the worse because it seems so obviously like a good idea.

But how can one deny that we should strive for equality of fair opportunity? Here’s one way. If you think property rights override everything else, and you always have the right to do what you will with your property no matter what; then it follows that you don’t have to hire gay people if you don’t want to and you don’t have to serve people of color at your restaurant if you don’t want to. This is how Rand Paul, who fancies himself a libertarian, got in trouble – questioning the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I have no sympathy for this way of being against equal opportunity. Of course, nondiscrimination, what is often called “formal” equality of opportunity, is a requirement of justice. I just don’t think we should call that equal opportunity. I would prefer that we treat the right not to be discriminated against as a basic liberty on par with free speech or the right to vote – maybe, even as part of, or an extension, of equality before the law. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

Shade from the mango tree blocked out the light to my room. I felt into the darkness of my wardrobe, and as I did so I hoped a confused cobra had not gotten lost and slithered in and curled itself up and taken temporary residence in a corner amongst my clothes.  I walked my fingers down my pile of shirts until I recognised the texture of the one I wanted to wear, and dragged it out. Nervous excitement whirled around in my stomach.  Today could be the day, I thought, as my fingers fumbled to button up my shirt.  Perhaps I was being foolish: perhaps I shouldn’t go.

‘Let’s go. Let’s go.  It’s getting late,’ shouted the driver, as he gestured to the group of guerrillas languishing on the veranda waiting to get into the vehicle for their ride home. The murky green of the pick-up made it look more like a battle tank than a transport vehicle.

The four young men threw their carry bags into the back and clambered onto the vehicle and perched themselves on the seat. The cool breeze would fan their hair and their faces as they made their way along to their homes, and from where they could be on guard also. They held their Kalashnikovs tight and upright between their legs. They knew their lives depended on keeping a firm grip of that rifle as they passed through the jungle road where the known that lurked amongst the tangled foliage posed as great a threat as the unknown. Read more »

Self-portrait in a reflection in a passing train window, while another train goes the other way behind me, at the train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in May of 2019.

by Brooks Riley

Racing down a German autobahn at impossible speeds is like running past a smorgasbord when you don’t have time to eat. Exit signs fly by, pointing to delicious, iconic destinations that whet the appetite but that one has no time for: Hameln, Wittenberg, Quedlinburg, Eisenach, Erfurt, Altenburg, Jena, Weimar, Dessau—markers of histories whose tentacles reach into the present in ways that belie their sleepy status on the map. You suppress the urge to slow down and take the off-ramp instead of moving right along to a big-city destination You opt to remain on the asphalt treadmill with arrival anxiety, telling yourself that one day you will take the time to explore all this, just not right now.

That was my first brush with Dessau, as I was rushing somewhere else. I knew that it was a home of the Bauhaus and that it had been heavily bombed during the war—more than half of it destroyed. In the distance I could see the amorphous outline of a town I wanted to visit someday.

Destiny must have listened. For reasons that had nothing to do with architecture or the Bauhaus, I ended up spending time in both Weimar and Dessau—the two main locations of a movement that exerted an immeasurable influence on the future of architecture worldwide, and occupied an inordinate amount of downtime in my imaginary life. Read more »

by David Introcaso

Two weeks ago the 9th US Circuit Court heard oral arguments in the Juliana v. the US case filed in 2015 by 21 children who petitioned the federal court to require the government to protect their Constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by addressing the climate crisis. In its defense the US argued the plaintiffs have “no fundamental constitutional right to a stable climate system,” or a “climate system capable of sustaining human life.”

It appears plaintiffs’ lives are in fact not protected.  In a just-published essay in The New England Journal of Medicine by Harvard’s Dr. Renee Salas and her colleagues concluded, “climate change is the greatest public health emergency in our time and is particularly harmful to fetuses, children and adolescents.” This is because recent reports including the US’s National Climate Assessment, the United Nations’ (UNs’) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) “Global Warming of 1.5ºC” and Lancet’s “Countdown on Human Health and Climate Change” all describe in agonizing detail rapid atmospheric warming from currently 1º Celsius to 2º Celsius within the next few decades are causing increasing flooding, wildfires, disease, starvation, forced migration and war.  According to a recent Carbon Brief study, the carbon budget of a child born today will have to be one-eighth that of one born in 1950 if they want to live in a world that is less than 2º Celsius warmer.

The Juliana case along with numerous related others was decades overdue.  Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has denied or worked to undermine the life-extinguishing effects of atmospheric warming.  President Trump summarized his recent 90-minute discussion on the topic with Prince Charles by stating, “the US right now has among the cleanest climates.”  He refused to recognize climate science stating, “I believe there’s a change in weather and I think it changes both ways.” Incoherent rhetoric aside, the US Geological Survey recently decided to project climate crisis impacts only through 2040 rather than to the end of the century to avoid detailing the worst impacts of Anthropocene warming. Read more »