by Jonathan Kujawa

Each year my department hosts an all-day event for high school students interested in math. Nowadays we have approximately 400 students and 20-30 teachers join us from all across Oklahoma and north Texas. Some drive 2+ hours each way to come!

The students’ goal? Probably getting out of class is high on the list :-).

Our goal is for the students to have fun and see interesting math they are likely to have never seen before. More generally we hope the students see math as a lively, engaging, and creative subject with lots of interesting open questions which are areas of active research. It’s meant to be an antidote to the dusty, rigid, cut-and-dry subject they usually see in an educational system focused on standardized tests and the like.

The highlight of the day, at least for me, is a talk by a visiting mathematician chosen for their reputation as an excellent speaker. It gives me an all-to-rare chance to hear a non-technical introduction to some cool math. This year we had the pleasure of hosting Diana Davis. Dr. Davis earned her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2013 and is now faculty at Swarthmore College. She gave a fantastic talk about playing billiards on a pentagonal billiard table.

Since we are mathematicians who are untroubled by the real world, we will always assume there is no friction nor spin to our billiard balls. This means the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection and a ball can bounce around the table forever. We’ll also assume the table has no pockets and the ball never hits a corner. This is because our interest will be in understanding the trajectories a ball could take as it bounces around the table and pockets and corners would cause complications. A fundamental first question is if there is always a periodic trajectory: that is, a path that eventually repeats itself and, hence, repeats over and over forever. Read more »

Tavares Strachan. Untitled. 2014-15.

Neon sculpture.

More here, here, and here.

by Elizabeth S. Bernstein

From whatever quarter the scientist comes to the study of human behavior – psychology, sociology, education – he finds that the unwise behavior of the mother has had much to do with the wrong starting of the personality trend. —Ernest R. Groves and Gladys Hoagland Groves (1928)¹

Childrearing practices in the United States underwent a radical alteration during a period from the last decade of the nineteenth century through the first few decades of the twentieth. In 1929, psychologists William Blatz and Helen Bott looked back on the changes they credited to Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, whose childcare manual was first published in 1894 and continued to come out in new editions every few years:

The publication of Dr. Holt’s Care and Feeding of Children marked an epoch. . . . Previous to this mothers had brought their children up by rule of thumb, the child’s demands being the gauge of the mother’s behavior. Thus, if the baby cried he was fed, if he was fretful he was rocked or dandled, if he had colic he was walked the floor with, this being accepted as all in the day’s work in bringing up a baby. All this Dr. Holt and his followers significantly changed. Instead of the baby’s demands, the rule laid down by the specialist prescribed the rule for the mother to follow.²

The subtitle of Holt’s book was A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses. In it, in question and answer form, he taught mothers to apply in their own homes the lessons which he had learned as the first attending physician at the New York Babies’ Hospital. Those lessons included that all babies were to be fed the same quantities at the same intervals and put to sleep at precisely the same time every day. Infants who were hungry when it was not feeding time would have to wait; those who were sleeping when it was feeding time would be awakened. Practically from birth infants were to be held over chamber pots twice a day, with a piece of soap introduced into their rectums to induce a bowel movement. By this method Holt claimed that the baby could be trained to regular action of the bowels by three or four months of age. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

I recently read Jill Lepore’s This America–which she describes as a “long essay,” calling on historians to begin again to tell stories about America to counter the rise of nationalism in the country, to bring about “a new Americanism, as tough-minded and openhearted as the nation at its best.” She writes that patriotism is not the same as nationalism: “Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred.” Lepore quotes Stanford historian Carl N. Degler, who at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1986 accused his colleagues of abandoning the study of the nation. Degler warned that if historians failed to “provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.” As Michael Lind points out in his review of This America, Lepore has made clear in other venues that she has problems with the “very lefty history that can’t find a source of inspiration in the nation’s past and therefore can’t really plot a path forward to power.” The left has renounced patriotism to such an extent as to leave a vacuum that the right has filled.

In recent decades, many individuals who were previously underrepresented in the history academy began to write about the experiences of their ancestors, both in this country and in their countries of origin. The study of American history took a turn toward globalism, cosmopolitanism, and individualism. In the late 20th century, many historians felt that by studying the American nation they would prop up nationalism, which many believed was on the wane. As we now know, nationalism has not died, as evidenced by the rise of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and many others. Far from it.

Lepore has arguably directed This America not only at her fellow historians but at all Americans, urging us to begin to see ourselves again as part of a nation with a history that is worthy of being remembered as positive and illustrious–overall. She does not gloss over the negative by any means. Lepore paints the current battle of ideas in America as nationalism versus liberalism. Liberalism, “a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment”–was not a feature of the United States at the beginning of its nationhood. How are historians to square this fact with Lepore’s call for a renewed focus on telling a story of American liberalism to counter the rise of nationalism in the form it has taken in the last century? That is their quandary and ours to wrestle with.  Read more »

Dr. Joseph Jurcic specializes in the research of acute myeloid leukemia, radioimmunotherapy with alpha and beta particle-emitting radioisotopes, monoclonal antibody therapy for leukemia, and the molecular monitoring of minimal residual disease. His work focuses on the treatment of acute and chronic leukemias, myeloproliferative neoplasms, and myelodysplastic syndrome. He received the 2001 Louis and Allston Boyer Young Investigator Award for Distinguished Achievement in Biomedical Research from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Jurcic is currently Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and Director of the Hematologic Malignancies Section of the Division of Hematology/Oncology with over 80 articles and book chapters to his name.

Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

by Lisa Herzog, Stephan Jonas, Philipp Kellmeyer, Karola Kreitmair, Michael Klenk, Eva Kuhn, and Kai Spiekermann

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, often referred to as Big Tech, know more about you than your closest friends and family. They know who you are talking to and what you are talking about, what you are buying or are thinking of buying, how much money you have, and what your fears and desires are. What a few years ago may have sounded like a dystopic vision, is today a reality of our online life (our ‘onlife’). In this setting, even Facebook’s plans of introducing their own currency, Libra, does not seem out of the ordinary.

While users of digital technology operate on an implicit assumption of trust this trust is misguided. The trouble is not merely that a given company records user behaviour within its own digital ecosystem but that companies integrate virtually all of our online activities from a plethora of sources, thereby making us transparent and vulnerable to observation, manipulation, and exploitation.

Tracking personal data streams has become the dominant business model of the web. What this means is that when a service is ‘free’ on the web, your data is the payment that sustains the business model. In this internet of humans, in which personal data have become the most valuable commodity, we have no meaningful control over who has access to such information and no power to amend, correct, or withdraw it. In light of recent push-back against online privacy violations, e.g. Facebook losing users and facing a $5bn fine after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as well as a growing public animosity towards big tech (so-called tech-lash), companies have learned that user privacy concerns could hurt their revenue streams and thus should not be ignored. Unsurprisingly, most proposals by tech representatives intended to address these issues involve a thorough revision of privacy laws and some form of making money by selling privacy privileges, such as subscription models that permit the use of apps without providing data or enduring ads.

One could argue that people concerned with their privacy should just stop using online services altogether. But given the pervasiveness of interconnected digital technology, this is unrealistic. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Brooks Riley

A long time ago, on a mountainside in Liechtenstein, I tuned my transistor radio to the Deutschlandfunk, one of neighboring Germany’s state radio stations whose broadcast range leaked into that tiny country. This is what I heard:

Hier ist der Deutschlandfunk, heute aus der Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

It wasn’t the fact that the station was transmitting country music, a treat for the Virginia girl far from home. It was the announcer’s voice that enthralled me and the language it spoke. There was an elegance, a muted, dependable deep resonance, a flow of words with a rhythmic logic that made me long to be able to speak that way. It sounded noble, above the fray, measured and meaningful. I could imagine that voice reciting Shakespeare or Schiller or Rilke.

This was not the ‘Achtung!’ German most Americans know from movies about the Nazis, or newsreels of Hitler speeches, or parodies of authoritarian figures in uniform. And despite the subject at hand—a country music broadcast—the voice-over did not try to mimic the jovial downhome twang of the good-ole-boy announcer from my deep South. It could just as well have been narrating a classical music concert from an ‘opry’ closer to home.

I added German to my bucket list that day. Read more »

by Adele  A Wilby

Biographies frequently provide us with insights into individual characters in a way that autobiographies might not: the third person narrator offers the prospect of greater ‘objectivity’ when evaluating and narrating information and events and circumstances.  And so it is with Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich’s Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman,and Katie Kirkpatrick’s Becoming Beauvoir: A Life.These two books provide a wealth of knowledge on the political and philosophical thinking that engaged the brilliant minds of two significant women of the twentieth century: Emma Goldman and Simone Beauvoir.

The life trajectories of the two women could not have been more different: Goldman was a Jewish Russian émigré to the United States; she learned her politics through experience and in that process clarified her political thinking on anarchism, and her life was lived humbly. Beauvoir on the other hand, was from a bourgeois Catholic family and benefited from a formal education and she lived life relatively comfortably. However, despite their divergent lifestyles and politics, similarities can be drawn between their thinking on women, love and freedom.

There is literature available on these issues, but Goldman and Beauvoir were prepared to live the principles they espoused in the early twentieth century. For both women, freedom was central to their thinking and shaped the way they lived their lives. Consequently, their personal relationships were unconventional:  they had many lovers and loves, including, in the case of Beauvoir, female lovers. Nevertheless, they were able to sustain a relationship with one man in particular throughout their lifetimes:  Alexander Berkman in the case of Emma Goldman, and Jean Paul Sartre in the case of Simone de Beauvoir. Commenting on her first encounter with Berkman, Goldman says, ‘a deep love for him welled up in my heart… a feeling of certainty that our lives were linked for all time’. Beauvoir also identified something special in her meeting of Sartre: she was prepared to enter into a ‘pact’ with Sartre that was premised on a love for each other. The ‘pact’ would separate their relationship from ‘lesser’ lovers: their love would be what Sartre termed an ‘essential love’, and they were then free to pursue their open relationship unburdened of the constraints of monogamy and marriage.

However, as we learn from Avrich and Avrich and Kirkpatrick the sexual relationship between these enduring couples eventually came to an end. Read more »

Pedestrian underpass for crossing the main road through the town of Freienfeld in the South Tyrol. Photo taken in November, 2019.

by Tim Sommers

Suppose you had some undeniable proof of the Everettian or Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. You would know, then, that there are very many, uncountably many, parallel worlds and that in very many of these there are many, many nearly identical versions of you – as well as many less-closely related “you’s” in still other worlds. Would this change the way you think about yourself and your life? How? Would you take the decisions that you make more or less seriously?

Consider Larry Niven’s 1971 take on that question. In a fitting contrast to the infinite multiplication of actions implied by the existence of a quantum multiverse, his story, “All the Myriad Ways”, consists entirely of a solitary police detective sitting alone and trying to puzzle out why a rash of unexplained suicides has accompanied the discovery of multiple, parallel universes. He begins to think that people see the existence of a world corresponding to every possible choice they might make as undermining the idea that they have any choice at all. In the end, he puts his own gun to his head – and all of the possible outcomes of that occur at once. I think there is more than one way of understanding this story. It’s not necessarily that people are inspired to take a fatalistic attitude by the knowledge of other worlds, it’s that just by recognizing that suicide is one of the possible outcomes, it becomes one of the things that will happen in some world or another.

But there may be a basic misunderstanding about quantum parallel universes lurking there. The splitting of universes has nothing to do with you and your decisions. Subatomic quantum events cause the universe to split, not you. You can, however, cause the universe to split whenever you make a decision by tying that decision to a quantum event. There’s an app for that. (Warning! This app only works if the MWI of Quantum Mechanics is correct.) Anyway, in the end, it’s not clear that it matters what causes the universe to split since it is splitting so often and so fast that it should create plenty enough parallel universes to cover all the decisions you could possibly make.

How should you feel about this? Read more »

Damon Zucconi. A Cipher, 2019.

Handwriting synthesis, 2d bin packing, UV curing ink on Alu-dibond.

More here, and here.

Current show.

by Charlie Huenemann

“There’s only one rule I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” —Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Despite Vonnegut’s strong counsel to babies entering the world, kindness seems to be in short supply. Little wonder. Our news media portray to us a world of power politics, corporate greed, murders, and cruel policies which are anything but kind. Our popular forms of entertainment, much more often than not, are stories about battles that shock and thrill us and gratify our lust for bloody vengeance, leaving no room for wimpy, kind sentiments. Success is advertised to us as requiring harsh discipline, dedication, and focus, and kindness, it appears, need not apply. Even though we all like to give and receive kindnesses, they seem to play no role in our political, social, and cultural economies.

We might be misled into thinking of kindness as bound up with ethereal virtues, such as a pervasive love for all humanity, or a spiritual peace from the heart that passes all ordinary understanding. To advocate for this sort of kindness sounds like recruiting for some mystical cult. But ordinary experience tells us that kindness is neither magical nor extraordinary. It’s an everyday thing. You and I meet in the street, and I say, “That’s a cool shirt!” and you say, “Thanks! Kind of you to say so.” A teacher hears out a student’s tale of woes, and grants an extension on a paper out of kindness. You slow down to allow another car pull into traffic, and get a cheery wave in reply. And so on, through many instances of life, in all sorts of ways. Being kind does not require being Gandhi. It doesn’t even require love. It just requires a bit of, well, kindness.

Kindness, I think, does not require spiritual attunement, but requires only patience and empathy. Read more »

Dr. Benjamin Ebert is remarkable for his leadership in describing the genomic landscape of adult myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), including identifying critical new roles for ribosomal dysfunction. His laboratory discovered the molecular basis of lenalidomide activity in MDS as well as multiple myeloma. Recent studies have identified clonal hematopoiesis and its contribution to both hematologic malignancies and cardiovascular disease. Along with human genetic studies, Dr. Ebert’s lab has made significant contributions to understanding the biological basis of the transformation of hematopoietic cells by somatic mutations. Currently, he is chair of the medical oncology department at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

by Jeroen Bouterse

In a radio sketch by the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, David Mitchell plays an interviewer trying to get a cabinet minister to say what he really thinks about the government’s funding cuts. At first, Robert Webb, playing the minister, says there is no disagreement between him and the cabinet, but the interviewer presses on, continually repeating the same question: “OK …. but what do you really think?”

At one point, the minister unrealistically breaks under these faux-critical questions, and admits:

“It’s all lies. I hate it, I’m against it, all right? […] That’s it, my career is over.”

You’d think that was enough. But after a pause, the interviewer replies:

-“Yes, but what do you really think?”

“Look, it’s all futile. We’re all nothing but specks of flesh going through this obscene dance of death for nothing. Everything is nothing.”

-“….Thank you minister.”

I associate nihilism with existential honesty, a recognition of truths about our world and our lives that goes beyond personal, social or political honesty, that cuts through all webs of meaning that we have spun for ourselves and sees them for what they are: vanishingly thin threads in an infinite void.  As such, nihilism seems to me very much the final word on human existence. The only thing is that it is such a transcendental, ‘cosmic’ claim that it doesn’t really connect to any aspect of our own lives, petty or heroic as they are. Read more »