Skip to main content

Math Sense

A friend forwarded me a TED talk by Clio Cresswell after hearing me praise the Eugenia Cheng's book I had read recently. The talk was entertaining and made me want to read the book itself - Mathematics and Sex. It's definitely not my kind of book - the pace is too choppy, there are too many ideas competing for attention and none seriously delve into either of the subjects referenced in the title of the book. 

If you were looking to be edified one way or the other you will be disappointed. If you expected to understand how math drives our primal instincts or perhaps predict our likelihood to find and keep love in our lives, you will come up short. That said, it makes for an easy and entertaining read. 

The math people in my life would find such writing ridiculous but for folks like me who don't have advanced math degrees, it could be amusing - for instance this bit about the curse of dimensionality as manifested by increasing the number of questions people are asked on a dating site to help facilitate a good match:

But, here is my second thing: this all works until we’re confronted with the curse of dimensionality. It turns out the more questions there are, or in other words the more dimensions you take into consideration, the harder it can be to find a concept of similarity that makes sense. Why? Because all calculated differences can end up being around the same number. The difference between the differences can be so small that how different you are to someone or similar to them becomes open to many interpretation

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more