Tables of Numbers

Usually I try to excuse myself from arithmetic reponsibilities, explaining that, contrary to popular understanding, maths is about the manipulation of greek letters, rather than the manipulation of actual numbers. We mathematicians tend to leave the latter to accountants.

In spite of this, I have been working hard lately to write code to compute some actual numbers for me. Garden variety calculators (even the fancy graphing kind) won't produce these numbers for me. There are some calculators for mathematicians that will do this sort of computation. See, for example:



What I'm trying to produce here are some numbers which determine certain kinds of modular forms. My code will eventually produce modular forms that even William Stein's lovely calculator doesn't (yet) find for me. In the meantime, I'm just trying to get it to work in the cases where I already have data to compare with mine. I finally got it to match up with some old tables of numbers from John Cremona. Here's a small sample:



The numbers in the table are eigenvalues for simultaneous eigenvectors for the matrices giving the action of Hecke operators T_p, where the p are, for example, the primes you see in the left hand column. (These are primes in the Gaussian integers.) The congruence subgroup in question here is Gamma_0(N) where the level N is given in the top row.

Getting my numbers to match up with his is like a return to the good old days when doing math included that so very satisfying part where you match your answer up with the one in the back of the book.

Update

Where, you ask, is Flat Stanley? After dancing with the druids, he had been planning to spend some time in Regent Street and Leicester Square. I was supposed to get him back from Severine last night when I met up with her and a couple of other friends from our Chinese class for dinner. But it turns out that Severine is a much better Flat Stanley host than I; she's now taking him to Scotland next week!

I should be flat and made out of paper.

read me

Support Ken & Chris!

Ken and Chris are doing a half marathon in June to raise money for Leukemia research. We get over 80 people at Thanksgiving yet very few of those 80 people are on the list of supporters. Admittedly, some may have chosen to donate anonymously, but my guess is that most, like myself, had been meaning to donate and just hadn't gotten around to it. I finally did, and I'm a poor graduate student. So you can too. If all 80 of us each donate $100, we'll blow past their fundraising goal. It's easy. Just go to their donation website:

http://www.active.com/donate/tntwhv/tntwhvCTorrey

纽约天气

我是美国人。 我家住在纽约。 纽约天气好。 夏天热，可是不太热。 有时候很潮湿。 秋天很漂亮，有点儿凉快。 纽约冬天比论敦冷。 纽约冬天常常下雪。 我很喜欢下雪天。 春天也很好， 暖和。

This is my homework assignment for Chinese class tonight. We're supposed to describe the weather in our hometown. Here's what it says (I hope):

New York Weather

I am American. My family lives in New York. New York weather is nice. In the summer, it's hot, but not too hot. Sometimes it is very humid. The fall is beautiful; it's a little cool. Winter in New York is colder than in London. In New York in the winter, it often snows. I very much like when it snows. Spring is also very nice; it's warm.

(Yes, I sound like a 5 year old.)

Stonehenge

I haven't been to Stonehenge yet, but Flat Stanley has! My friend Severine mentioned last week that she would be taking a trip out there, so I asked her to bring him along. Here he is, in front of Stonehenge in windy but otherwise lovely spring weather.




They also visited Salisbury cathedral. Looks like Flat Stanley enjoyed his first sightseeing trip in England.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

On St. Patrick's Day, everyone is Irish! And, apparently, 19 years old. We went out with Brenda to Twickenham to celebrate with some other friends of hers from Ireland. Twickenham is all the way out in zone 5; it's probably not even officially London.

We got shamrocks painted on our faces (with eyeliner and green glitter nailpolish) and people were eating green vodka jello, something I don't think I've seen since I was in college. We listened to The Pogues and The Dubliners and one of the Irish girls even did a bit of dancing. Maybe next year we'll get Brenda to dance for us.

My favorite part of the evening was the bus ride from our hosts' house to the pub. There were some Irish guys on the bus who commiserated with our group about Ireland's rugby loss earlier in the day, expressing outrage at the obviously unfair calls made against the home team. Being St. Patrick's Day, this led naturally into belting out Irish songs on the upper deck of the bus. It was good craic.

I had been joking about how we would end up at an O'Neill's, which is a chain of Irish pubs in England. (Although America is the king of chains, we don't seem to have pub chains.) The pub we usually go to is an O'Neill's across the street from our office. Brenda complains about it for not being authentically Irish, but passing itself off as such and also because they're not generally the nicest pubs around, though they're cheap and relaxed.

In the end, we actually did try to go to an O'Neill's last night, but there was a huge queue out the door and down the block, even in sleepy Kingston. We ended up instead at a Wetherspoons, which is another pub chain and the only pub Brenda likes less than O'Neill's. They're even cheaper and tend to be cavernous, so you can usually find a place to sit. On the other hand, there were a lot of very drunk kids to contend with.

We finally got to meet Alicia's boyfriend Eric, who is studying in Nottingham. They are both from Mexico, and this was their first St. Patrick's Day. I think they should bring it back with them to Mexico when they return.

The Knowledge

A woman in my Chinese class told me about The Knowledge, which is what you must have if you want to become a licensed taxi cab driver in London.

You may be licensed either for the whole of London or for one or more of the 16 suburban sectors. The "All London" licence requires you to have a detailed knowledge of the 25,000 streets within a six mile radius of Charing Cross with a more general knowledge of the major arterial routes throughout the rest of London. If you wish to work as a taxi driver in central London or at Heathrow Airport you need an "All London" licence.

25,000 streets! Julie, who was telling me about this, said that the test might not be as rigorous anymore, since they all have GPS now. That's rather sad, since this is really impressive and makes taking a cab possibly worth the price. (Here's the official site.)

Petition

Avaaz.org continues their attempt to do internationally what MoveOn.org has been doing in the U.S.. Their latest petition will be presented in person to the German Environment Minister, who is chairing an international meeting on climate change this week. Sign on! If enough of us clamour for action, maybe even the U.S. government will listen.

I got a Flat Stanley!

Flat Stanley arrived safely last night after a long and tiresome but uneventful journey. He's still a bit jetlagged and cramped from the flight, but hopefully he'll straighten out soon.

I can't wait to take him around London, but I'm afraid Sarah may have overestimated the excitement of my life here. Her class might be disappointed when he comes back with a series of photos alternating between Flat Stanley at my office and Flat Stanley at the pub across the street from my office (where hopefully he can avoid the dreaded fate of being used as a coaster, or "drink mat" as they say here). Actually, last week at the pub we met a guy who does origami, a hobby that must really put the fear of God into a fellow like Flat.

他很懒。

In Chinese class last night, we had to pair up and describe a family member to our partner, who would then tell the class about this family member. I chose my brother David because we had learned how to say "David" in Chinese. Here's what I told them:

我弟弟叫大为。 他十九岁。 他是大学生。 他很懒。 他不做作业。 他认为他很帥， 可是他还没有女朋友呢。

I'm afraid it's not a very flattering portrait, but it got a few laughs. Actually, I'm not sure if it's accurate. Is David 19? Does he not have a girlfriend?

(I just figured out that I have to enter "nv" to get the "nü" in "nü peng you".)

We learned last night that "computer" is 电脑 (dian nao) which means "electric brain". We also learned the terms for single and married and our teacher told us that in China, November 11th (11/11) is called "singles' day".

Embedded games!

This is what I wanted this summer while we were in China! I saw on Karen's blog that she had found an applet to display games in her blog, so that people don't have to download them and open them with a separate sgf editor. Of course, they look much nicer in CGoban, but I guess one can't have everything.

Here's a recent game posted on Go4Go.net:



















On Guo Juan's recommendation, I've been studying old Lee Sedol games lately, with the aim of improving my fighting skills. Nowadays, Lee Sedol has calmed down a bit and doesn't aggressively overplay the way he used to. I'm happy to study any games (not just Lee Sedol) with a lot of fighting in them.

Since I have a tendency to be a relatively calm player, I'm interested in how to start fights and also in how to play good shape during the fights. It's also fascinating to see how these guys walk this tightrope, playing chicken. There's a balance to maintain--leaving your weak groups to play bigger points, but coming back just in time (or, if you're off, too late) to save them. One also has to weigh the option of abandoning your weak group to kill (or threaten to kill) something bigger on the other side.

As a smaller side note, I don't understand (in the above embedded game) why White plays moves 168 (B15) and 172 (C13). It seems to me that this is just wasting ko threats, and inciting Black to play moves like 175 (L13) and 177 (N13), which take away White's liberties.

Katrina

Dad, Mark and Kate recently went down to Mississippi with a group from Dad's church to help with post-Katrina reconstruction. Yes, a year and a half later, they still need every ounce of assistance they can get. In a CounterPunch.org article, they said, "Locals call it 'the Grand Canyon effect' - you know about it, you have seen it on TV, but when you see it in person it can take your breath away." My impression from Kate was the same. She said it looks like the hurricane happened last week instead of last year. There are huge piles of garbage everywhere and those homes still standing remain gutted out from all the water damage.

In a departure from his usual policy (he allegedly doesn't want his entourage to get in the way of recovery efforts), Bush actually is planning to visit Alabama after the tornadoes did so much damage the other day. What he doesn't seem to understand is that if he continues to effectively ignore the people affected by these disasters, then there is no recovery effort for him to hinder.

Mailing Lists

I have my Brandeis email forwarded to my King's College account, which provides me with a few extra irrelevant emails to delete each day. Some of them are mildly entertaining, however, like the time I read that all classes had been cancelled and buildings closed for the afternoon due to the storm, which confused me for a moment before I realized that the email was from Brandeis and not King's.

There have been a couple of announcements over the past few days that I've also found amusing, like the following statement from a description of an upcoming conference:

We are lucky to have as our key note speakers Professor Mary Baine Campbell (English Department, Brandeis University), and Professor Marina Leslie (Northeastern University), both of whom are doing wonderful work in the field of Utopian studies.

"wonderful work in the field of Utopian studies"... :) Even better, they sent out an email this morning warning of the commencement of construction on a new science complex. The subject of the email was "Blasting and Excavation for Science Project to Begin March 12", providing delightful images of lab slaves (chemistry grad students) with rather heavier equipment than usual.