Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

New comment on your post #489 “Above average”
Author : Sariel Har-Peled
Comment:
There is a copy in my home. The relevant people should know where it is…

Moral prinicipals – whats that?

There is a copy in my home. The relevant people should know where it is…

Moral prinicipals – whats that?

New comment on your post #489 “Above average”
Author : Chandra
Comment:
Would you be able to bring back a copy of the book to Urbana? Or is it against your moral principles?

Would you be able to bring back a copy of the book to Urbana? Or is it against your moral principles?

Above average is a book by Amitab Bagchi that was published recently in India. It is somewhat autobiographical, and tell the story of a teenager growing in Delhi, entering IIT and his life there.

But above everything else it is a story about growing up. About coming to terms with ones abilities and limitations in the context of a competitive environment like IIT, and finding, if not happiness, at least stability and acceptance of oneself. A search made harder by the environmental pressures. A search that is not over for a lot of people in universities (either graduate students or faculty). Indeed, in such an environment your achievements in the rat race are equated as happiness, and the pressure to succeed is omnipresent. Hell, how can you be happy if your GPA is only 70 out of a 100?

I grew up in a different setup were there was a competitive pressure because of my friends, but ultimately there was no real pressure. Getting into university, and grad school were essentially a trivial achievements with no pain. This is in contrast to the IIT system were you have to do quite well in an exam (200,000 take it), rank in the top 200 to enter computer science. Even then, during your undergrad there is an unrelenting pressure to have good grades and succeed. The difference between my relatively relaxed experience and the experience of the hero of Above Average was quite interesting. The story got me thinking about my own personality and research and how much I am competition averse (in some sense, before some people start making nasty comments).

But Above Average is much more than that. I liked its descriptions of life in Delhi, and its descriptions of human relationships. I had fun reading it, and while I was deeply disappointed that no aliens from outer space landed by page 70 of the book, I do recommend it.

This book is largely a collection of snapshots. You might find some snapshots strange and bizarre, and some of them you would recognize from your own life. A trip back to earlier times and experiences. There is something comforting in that growing up in Tel-Aviv and Delhi can be so different but yet so similar.

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Oh, and one of my photographs of Amitab was used in some newspaper article about him in India. Heck, I am a published photographer now (without credit, but what can you do).

The classical result of Johnson-Lindenstrauss showed that distance between n points are preserved if one projects them down to **O(eps-2 log n )** dimensions. It turns out however that much more information is being preserved. Indeed, Avner Magen showed that even angles and volumes defined by the point sets are preserved.

But can even more structure be preserved? It turns out that considerably more structure survives as long as this structure is low dimensional. In particular, distances between n (low dimensional) curves are being preserved (i.e., for every pair of points on the two curves the distances are preserved). This even holds for “nice” surfaces. Namely, these low-dimensional creatures are preserved in the embedding. This holds also to moving points that have nice motion.

Interestingly, one can show that distances are preserved with additive error for surfaces with bounded doubling dimension.

You can see more details (and more relevant refs) in the upcoming SoCG paper by Pankaj Agarwal and Hai Yu (and myself), available here.

There still seem be interesting research left to be done. We still do not seem to know completely what structures are being preserved and which are not.

Made it to KAIST, Korea. After uneventful flights from Delhi through Hong Kong to Seoul, I was picked up by Otfried from the new airport. Stayed the night over in Seoul and then continued by fast train to Daejeon (150km in about 50 minutes). My apartment in the guest house is quite nice. Except for the Korean alphabet (which is BTW very interesting), the place feels like a western country.

It was sad to leave my “new” friends behind in Delhi. It was a great visit and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I had a great time, but who knows when I would come back?

And so it goes….

New comment on your post #483 “India 15 – Back”
Author : Sariel Har-Peled
Comment:
Oh, dont talk to me about theories. I hate them. Did you know that evolution is a theory??? Theories are just pyramid schemes – a theory leads only to more theories that lead to even more theories.

Oh, dont talk to me about theories. I hate them. Did you know that evolution is a theory??? Theories are just pyramid schemes – a theory leads only to more theories that lead to even more theories.