Rishi was born in Colombo, and grew up in Bangalore before going to college in Massachusetts, where he had a suitably unfocused liberal arts education. Afterwards, he drifted about India, and briefly worked as a journalist for a paper in Calcutta, interviewing local celebrities and struggling artists. He is now working towards a Phd in Applied Mathematics at Yale. In the meanwhile, he tries desperately to keep his literary and scientific interests away from each other, and to shield his worldview from the tentacles of modern science. Email: [email protected]
by Rishidev Chaudhuri The first lecture I got on summer drinking was accompanied by my first real job offer and my first real marriage proposal. All three were delivered by an elderly Sikh man, sitting next to me on a London-Delhi flight. His fondness for me emerged early, when I agreed to ask the air…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Like the rest of us poor mortals, wandering in constant confusion between things and the names for things, bewitched by language and unable to resist it, mathematicians and physicists are constantly struggling with their representations and yet entirely reliant upon them to grasp the world. Many of the fundamental intuitions that we…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Harold McGee's book, “On Food and Cooking”, changed the ways I cook and think about food (as it seems to have done for many people). Cooking can often seem obscure and unsystematic: recipes and tattered bits of kitchen wisdom abound, but general principles seem harder to come by. And learning to cook…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri and Jason Merrill C.P. Snow famously said that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is like never having read Shakespeare. Whatever the particular merits of this comparison, it does speak to the centrality of the idea of entropy (and its increase) to the physical sciences. Entropy is one of the most…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's “Perfumes” is an intriguing (and rather wonderful) collection of reviews of various scents. It is hard to write about smell while avoiding cliches: smell is almost always seen as a primitive, noble-savage sort of sense, pre-verbal and inextricably linked to sex and memory. They, on the other…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Monsters lurk in the artificial paradises that mathematicians construct for themselves, swimming, slouching and fluttering into view from the corners of the imagination. These strange beasts – odd constructions or unexpected consequences of axioms – trouble the mathematical mind and threaten to expel the mathematician into chaos. By embodying the limits and…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri One of the first things I do when visiting a new city is to look at a map of the subway, if the city has one. The intimacy this brings is in many ways misleading (I will have learnt nothing about individual places) but from this I get not just a list…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri My first winter that could properly be called such seemed to be spent in frozen Northern wastelands, where the world was covered in snow and the sun seemed to leave for the day after lunch (recalling the work habits of a number of my relatives). The scenery alternated between the bleakly restrained…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri There are many things that fascinate me about Calcutta: the way it remains poised between the stagnant and the revolutionary, the contrast between the ubiquitous echoes of history and the seeming timelessness of much of the city's life, the faded intimations of a once grand modernist city, the oddly archetypal characters who…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri It is an oddly well-kept secret that mathematical learning is a very active process, and almost always involves a struggle with ideas. To a large extent, this is due to the nature of mathematical intuition: grasping a mathematical idea involves seeing it from multiple angles, understanding why it's true in a broader…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Among the meditative practices I’ve explored, Vipassana seems the one that is most easily seen as a principled way of exploring the structure of one’s experience and the one most easily separated from a religious or soteriological context. This is true even amongst the Buddhist meditations. For example, Zazen is fascinating but…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri For the first week after I began taking a cell biology class I dreamed of deserts, vast sterile expanses of open heat with no living things, interrupted only by dreams of inter-galactic space and the structured infinity of mathematical forms. There is something profoundly disturbing and eerie about life at the molecular…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri I My first psychoanalyst was an old German woman, who lived in a faded flat overlooking a small lake in Calcutta and who spent our time making me lie on a couch and free-associate. Later, she’d point out things that I seemed to be avoiding – the putative hidden centers around which…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Asymptotic reasoning is ubiquitous in mathematics and the natural sciences, representing both a general approach to problems as well as a collection of techniques. It is one way of answering the question, “Which features of the world are relevant for our understanding?” Often, the behavior of a system gets simpler as it…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri The making of cocktails often falls unhappily into one of two extremes. If you have previously been subjected to the sickly sweet frozen neon drinks, so beloved of chain restaurants and a certain kind of tourist, you probably think of cocktail making as a base practice that strikes terror into the heart…
by Rishidev Chaudhuri Where does the environmental movement get its moral force? There are any number of practical reasons to care about, say, global warming, given that a world with a dramatically different climate will probably be dramatically less comfortable for us. But this is quite different from the set of reasons usually advanced by…
by Rishidev Chaudhury Five years ago I spent six months working on a farm about an hour outside Bangalore. To get to it I took a city bus thirty miles along the highway to a dusty crossing where it turned onto dirt roads and bounced along them for about twenty minutes before ending in the…
Artificial neural networks are computational models inspired by the organization of neurons in the brain. They are used to model and analyze data, to implement algorithms and in attempts to understand the computational principles used by the brain. The popularity of neural networks in computer science, machine learning and cognitive science has varied wildly, both…
It’s probably unfashionable to say this, and it’s certainly a sign of a thoroughly colonized mind, but English is my favorite language. There are many reasons for this: the massive vocabulary, the puns, the double-streamed Germanic-Romance roots (so that ‘mistake’, ‘wood’ and ‘hue’ mean and evoke differently from ‘error’, ‘forest’ and ‘color’). But a large…
To someone from the subcontinent, it is hard to believe that Indian restaurant owners in the United States are not malicious, reactionary, or in thrall to an obscure formal ideology. How else to explain what seems to be a concerted effort to trivialize a noble family of cuisines, both by reducing them all to a…