“Think It Over, and Then, Program!”… And, also, a bit on the calculus of variations…

In my last post (below), I talked about changing the way my study room is set up—removing the computer network from the desk-top and making room for writing in long hand. Now, I will talk something about a small sign-board (for reminding me) that I am going to put up in my room.

The sign-board will carry a simple command: “Think It Over, and Then, Program!” It will have the sub-title: “Can you make a C++ program out of this?” (The slogan obviously is paraphrasing of sorts of Dirac’s famous commandment: “Shut up and calculate!”)

The thing is that I am reading a lot on and about classical mathematics lately. I got into it when I was preparing for my forthcoming FEM course. Well, it at least began that way. But then, soon, it slipped into quite general readings on the history of calculus of variations, too. And further thereafter, it began getting transformed into finding roots of so many subtle assumptions that we so blithely make today in the areas of mathematical physics, engineering mechanics, elasticity, computational mechanics, etc.

For instance, consider this question: Why is quantum theory linear?

When was the last time I thought about this question? Probably, it was in 1992–94. Now, I am re-picking up the threads again, and this process began when I began reading about CoV.

In mathematics, there are no monolithic blocks of periods such as a period of “classical physics,” or one of “analysis,” etc.; there often are many different streams of thought existing simultaneously at any given time. The emphasis may differ, but the strains continue to exist.

Consider here, that there is this basic idea that physical systems should be described, not using Newtonian ideas of spatially delineated agents such as particles and the forces they enact and react to or the changes in velocities or momenta they suffer, but using an alternate set of ideas such as the potential of a field, a scalar quantity called energy, the idea of action, etc. That is, the ideas originated and propagated by Leibniz, Lagrange, Hamilton, et al.

I am not sure if I am getting the division right, but at least at a cursory glance, it seems that there are these two camps: (i) Fermat, Leibniz, Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Hamilton, et al all taken together on one hand, and, (ii) in his majestic and towering isolation, Newton, alone, on the other hand.

But I am not sure if I am getting the “camping” right.

The reason I am so tentative about this two-camps “theory” of mine is because I am not quite sure how to place three/four other names within the confines of my scheme; they disturb my “theorization”; they are: d’Alembert, Fourier, Gauss, and von Helmholtz (and perhaps one or two other people). Sure, d’Alembert and Fourier were responsible for creating those basic tools which are sympathetic to the ideations of the former camp (and to the action-at-a-distance viewpoint), the tools such as the technique of separation of variables (and the sin of making that appear static which actually is dynamic), and the idea of modeling using the spectral analysis, respectively. But still, somehow, I carry the impression that on the whole, these two Frenchmen never quite fully belonged to the former camp. Not as fully as Leibniz and Hamilton (and their modern-day followers in the area of quantum confusion mechanics) do. The two Germans, Gauss and von Helmholtz, particularly the latter, were just too good by way of their approach and work to belong to the former camp.

Just for the record, I, of course, am on the side of Newton. I never did like the idea of CoV. It has always been a very competent mathematics and still, a bad (or very bad) modeling idea—that’s my opinion of it. I hate to asribe to space what properly belongs to entities. It does no good to say that you can always get force by taking a gradient of a scalar and how it reduces the labor from three component equations to a single scalar equation, but, in the process of saying so, outright evade the issue of how anyone on earth is going to know what specific potential to use. Is divination or day-dreaming the recommended manner? And if not, who is going to calculate the effort in getting to the right potential? Overall, I think it doesn’t really simplify the problem but only changes its appearance and shifts the points of inconvenience, hiding them behind a nice “global” theory… Field theory may have its technical advantages, but the manner of advocacy—the underlying philosophy—of the field theoretic camp is often pretty bad, despite its popularity today, and needs to be exposed.

In any case, I am sure you are convinced that I am reading about a lot of classical mathematical ideas these days. Now ideas are fine as far as reading and thinking goes, but, as an engineer, one also has to get something real out of them. Here, given my strengths and inclinations, I have decided that I would rather create programs out of this kind of thinking of mine, rather than writing or solving analytical mathematical problems. But no, I do not thereby mean to imply that I don’t understand analysis or cannot deal with it… Below, I let me give some concretes of what I mean:

Consider the basic or starting ideas in the calculus of variations. How do people state it? How does the discussion begin?

The way they state it is, first of all, via an equation:

It is as if they would rather be found dead than not write down an equation. But more on this, just a short while later, i.e. right in this post, but after a short while. For the time being, look at that equation again. … Try to think like a fresh student.

The first challenge with the above equation is to decide precisely what is the unknown in or about it.

Naturally, all your learning cries out at you that it has got to be I, whatever it may be. Wrong. Plain wrong. In the great weird world of thinking along the CoV lines, the great unknown, of course, as you know, turns out to be the “y(x)”. The “I” is just a silent spectator, so to speak. The unknown, or the problem is y(x), even if it occurs deeply nested inside an integral on the right hand side of the equation. (Here, most mathematicians would lovingly repeat that idiotic quote (from Boltzmann) about leaving elegance to, of all professionals, cobblers and tailors, and thereby evade all the further issues actually observed and raised thus far. For example, the misleading way of formulating the problem—there is direct evidence of confusion of thinking in there, don’t you think?)

Next, notice that the above equation tells only an incomplete story. The real problem is not the above. The real problem is to find stationarity or “minimality”, i.e. to say something like:

LOL! Can you make any C++ program out of what we have said so far? If not, then, consider whether you (really) understand the matter as well as you should, or not.

Another minor point, concerning analysis and CoV. The inconvenient notation. Two sub-points here. (i) Why include both y(x) and x in the definition of the functional? Wouldn’t the context make the chain-relationship clear? Or is the whole idea to confound the reader as much as possible? Doesn’t the notation betray the (lack of) thinking? (ii) Why insist on using the form of an *equation*? You see, the whole thing becomes inconvenient precisely because the overall idea here is that you have to express everything in the format of “LHS = RHS”. But this kind of a format makes for a very bad notation when the fact to express is a choice from amongst an infinity of alternatives! Why not invent a new notation that clearly brings out the idea that there are an infinity of possible variations and that the one particular integral amongst them—the ultimate solution—is special and is to be singled out? Indeed, why at all call the choices by the name “variations”? Doesn’t using that word implicitly assume that you possess the knowledge of the desired but unknown solution in advance? (Variation, on what?) The idea of teleology is entangled far too deep in this issue, even if I believe that it *can* be separated out. But far more important: Why define terms in reference to an unknown? Isn’t it Platonic/Kantian/Hegelian kind of idealism oozing through here? Why not describe the issue straight-forwardly as an infinite set of definite integrals of a common definition and a common set of the specified boundary conditions? What wrong would that do?

In fact, when the notion of a function is introduced for the first time to kids, it is a normal practice to create two blobs (one each for the input and output sets i.e. the domain and the range sets) and connect them using one-way arrows (showing unique-valued correspondence). Everybody agrees that this kind of a diagram helps in rightly anchoring the idea in the mind. But when it comes to functionals, however, they never give a nomogram kind of a visualization… Why not? Do mathematicians fear losing abstractness of their definitions if they supply one? Oh yeah? Is that the motivation? Or is the motivation to keep the definitions as far away from a concrete-reality-based understanding and as high floating in the air as possible? What kind of motivation explains the complete lack of a good explanatory diagram (a concept map) for so basic concept as a functional, in all the 150 years of its history? … Sometimes, at least, you have to think if there isn’t more than plain teaching incompetence at work here, i.e., if there isn’t a kind of an “ideological” stink involved in here..

But, coming back to the text-book writing… What do you think they suggest by way of a “motivating” example? The same stale stuff of the brachistochrone problem!! Can’t you see that it is such an artificial problem, very specific to the constant gravitational field at the earth’s surface? That it cannot at all bring out the real essence of the idea…. Regardless, every textbook writer thinks it a terrible wrong if he doesn’t start CoV without (i) the brachistochrone (ii) the isoperimetrics (iii) the geodesics problems. (BTW, geodesics are *always* shown drawn on a neat sphere—not even an ellipsoid, let alone an arbitrary shaped surface.)

Here, I think, the command “Think It Over, and Then, Program!” would came in handy… In short, it’s high time we asked mathematicians to “Shut Up” asking us to “Calculate” all the time, and instead, think about the real world and the possible connections between their ideas and the real world…

When I recently deeply thought about how this thing could be better explained, I thought that the easiest way perhaps would be via computer simulation of a modification in the game of carrom.

What you can do is to simulate the game of carrom, but, say, with a soft iron striker (or a wooden striker affixed with a thin stamping of steel on top), and a few electromagnets placed on the sides (or underneath) the main surface of the carrom-board, so as to create a field inside the 2D domain. In the simulation, you would let the user vary the strengths and placements of the electromagnets, as well as the initial velocity (speed and direction) of the striker. You could then ask them to predict in advance where the striker will end up. (We assume c >> v so that the situation is non-relativistic.) The simulation would then show them the actual trajectory. The software could ask them to choose the direction and the speed so that the striker itself would end up in a corner pocket.. The software could also allow them to manually modify the actual trajectory (i.e. introduce variations) and automatically compute the value of the “action” for each variation. The program could help visualize the potential by plotting its surface z = f(x,y) in 3D. … So on and so forth…

It amazes me how stale analytical mathematicians can get…. Incidentally, this word “stale” reminds me of a story about Hamilton that I read somewhere (in an authentic kind of a book on the history of mathematics) a long time back. The story goes, in the times that he developed the idea of quaternions and his grand version of mechanics, Hamilton had gone half-mad of sorts. They had recovered discarded bones leftover after the meals together with Hamilton’s original (and seriously meant) handwritten papers. The papers (and the rest of the stuff) was found thrown all over the floor in his room. Apparently, Hamilton was *not* so engrossed in his work that he would forget to eat his meals; apparently, he had become so *careless* that he would not distinguish between his serious work (the papers)—by his own proclamation, the finest and grandest among mechanical thoughts—and the garbage left over from his meals. (In contrast, Newton *was* known to get so engrossed in his work as to forget taking his meals. But, despite his reputation as a sort of mad-man among quantum mechanicians of the 20th century, Newton never did get into any such mental states as Hamilton evidently did. Indeed, even when Newton ran the royal mint, it was with exemplary efficiency—not with a *mad*ness as historians and quantum physicists and mathematicians have preferred to tell us.) Apparently, the staleness which appears in the teaching of this kind of mathematicization—the case-studies and the ways of presentation of the mathematical ideas—comes about because our quantum mechanicians (and mathematicians and historians) take over into mathematics what were merely Hamilton’s personal habits. That, perhaps, could be the reason why, even today, we have to go through the same stale stuff of only the vertically oriented brachistochrones and the stupid but “mandatory” sequence involving the more or less completely useless (and yawn-inducing) isoperimetric problems. Such staleness!

Our students deserve better. … What I am doing (or, rather, proposing to do) is just a beginning. … You could do better than me. … But yes, the reminder: “Think It Over, and Then, Program: Can you make a C++ program out of this?” is clearly useful in many different ways…. I won’t go as far as to suggest that you should make a software program out of every little idea of mathematics. Or, more seriously (and importantly) that this kind of a “constructivist” approach is the only way to do good mathematics. Nope, it isn’t—though, it could very well be the only way to *validate* mathematical abstractions. … Anyway, I haven’t thought about this matter a great deal. BTW, there is a proper movement of sorts in mathematics which goes by the name “constructivism.” I don’t mean to use this word “constructivist” in that technical sense of the term. In fact, I haven’t read enough about constructivism to be able to form a judgement about it. All that I mean to say here is that mathematical ideas cannot come from thin air, that one must know what the referents of any mathematical concepts are, and if one does, it is easy to construct the higher-level abstraction from the lower-lever ones…

But coming back to my main point here, clearly, thinking about how particular programs could be written, is a way that seems to encourage at least fresh, if not highly creative, thinking…. It certainly helps counter the menace of floating abstractions… Think about it. … After all, not just our students’ but even our own minds deserve better—better than the kind of stale treatments we have been dished out thus far…

Changing work-habits: Writing by hand

Soon, I am going to make some changes in my work habits. I am going to begin writing things down.

The emphasis is on writing, i.e. on writing on paper and in the long hand, as in contrast to typing on a computer keyboard.

I oftentimes find that the interface of a keyboard and a monitor (and a mouse) is simply not good enough for quickly jotting down points in a natural way. Using a pen/pencil and a paper is a very easy way to simultaneously create “mind-maps” or “concept-maps” right while the writing process is in progress. May be there are other reasons too, but the act of handwriting also seems to reinforce learning in ways that typing and saving documents doesn’t. Typing is too mechanical and does not create those personal niches in short-term or long-term memory the way hand-writing seems to do. Writing by hand also is much faster when it comes to catching the transient flavors of the ephemeral states of your mind—you can alter, jump up and down a page, draw graphs, do it with digrams, arrows, doodles, symbols, reminders, and all that.

It is true that notes typed as computer documents are easy to rearrange through cut-and-paste. But the matter to be thus cut and pasted is itself best created in a prior stage of writing in the long hand.

Now all this is very obvious. But it surprises me that it has been a year since the time that I did any serious handwriting…. It was last Diwali, in fact, when, while doing the project work for Zeus Numerix (right, the same characters who did not pay me anything despite their promise), I had committed both my desks to all my computers at home, so as to make a network of sorts, to be able to complete their assignment which was on MPI (and also involved CGNS). The small “project” got over, but I, somehow, happened not to rearrange the space thinking best not to disturb it once the network was so neatly in place. And also not noticing that, in the process, it has taken away 100% of the desk-space that was available to me at home. It was only recently—last month—that I realized what a long time it has been since I wrote.

Incidentally, did I tell you that the best way of writing is done not while working at a desk-top itself but while keeping an engineering drawing board slanted in between the desk and the side-arms of a chair. It was at the COEP hostels that we discovered that this way of studying was most efficient & productive. Three reasons. (i) The angle of the board thus kept is, it has been found by experience, the most ergonomic. In contrast, on the usual horizontal surface of a desk, things kept afar tend to go out of the reach. They are at progressively more uncomfortable angles, both to the eye and to the hands. (ii) As compared to sitting in a chair at a desk, the board, once thus arranged tends to trap you in. It becomes a bit too heavy or unwieldy to easily get out of, especially if you have kept a couple of heavy books on it. (And which engineering books are not heavy? More on this, later…) It certainly becomes much more unwieldy than simply pushing the chair aside to get up and do “time-pass” around. Overall, sitting with the drawing board serves to keep you “at it” for a longer time. (Even hard to pin-down people are known to study for a couple of hours at a stretch!) (iii) It helps create some extra space on the table-top in addition.

Nope, scribd is not an alternative either. It has to be plain old writing on the paper.

A Real Quick Update (11 Oct. 2008)…

OK. I know I have not been blogging for a while… A lot of stuff is lying unorganized in my mind and I need to get it together…. In the meanwhile, here we go in a real quick manner—just the bullets (NASA style)

• About water resources in India. I am going to point out to a document prepared by a government agency, but cannot somehow find it right now on my local disk. Once I do, I will put my thoughts together. But still, briefly, as far as water management goes, groundwater level in India has been going down rapidly, and is a matter of grave concern already. I think a multi-pronged approach is necessary. While the points raised by Arundhati Roy in an article years back in Times of India were right (she spoke about settlement of soil and subsequent reduction in the capacity of the big dams, for what *technical engineering reasons* increasing heights is not always the solution, how more grainstock gets eaten by rats in FCI godowns than goes to poor people with the result that the government is actually is subsiding rats rather than people, etc.), I still believe there is a necessity to have large dam projects. Actually, it should be a mix of a few large, many medium, and numerous small or micro-level dams. There is no alternative to large dams for flood control, and the concentrated efforts undertaken by several NGOs towards educating the public on “groundwater harvesting” is, actually, a ridiculous idea—it is far too inefficient. Smart way would involve what general Indians (outside the government baboos) are poor at: meticulous records keeping. As my new suggestion, you need to ask all the bore-well drillers to submit records of what kind of rock exists at what location, and then, someone (ideally, a business house like Reliance) should use geographical software at a micro level to identify the best places to build both percolation tanks (numerous at micro scale, low-tech versions of them). With a bore-well at an avarage distance of a few kilometers (and in some locations, crowded further together), you will get a much better 3D map of soil layers and water table in different locations than the best maps government has on them today. It’s the typical dull bureaucratic mindset which has (i) advocated drilling more bore-wells, but essentially anywhere people wanted to, and (ii) not asked for records keeping for the millions of bore-wells already drilled. On the other hand, the NGOs seem to think that there is only one way to counter that kind of dullness, which is, to undertake colorful day dreaming and wishing that wherever in whatever urban areas people do groundwater harvesting, it’s going to be the right place to do so. More on all these topics, later. (But since I have been promising for a long time, I had to give at least an indication of what I had in mind.)
• About the nuclear deal. I am glad that it has, finally, gone through. ”Hushhh…” (That is like the “pheww” in the American, and not like the “shoooo”.) The Americans predictably gave talking points to communists and BJP alike, when they did insert, at the last minute, provisions to the effect that they won’t supply uranium for bombs-making in future (i.e., if India tests). The reason I supported the deal is not that I wish to see a weak India. The reason I supported it is because with this deal, a definite formal way has been put in place with which the two countries could talk on the issues. The BJP+’s idea has been to continue doing what they are best at: aggressive posturing. For instance, read Arun Shourie’s full-page articles in the recent times in Indian Express. (There are many in BJP who are not worth taking intellectual notice of; Shourie is rather in a minority in that party.) But sometime, you have to take a realistic stock of the situation in India and ask yourself, honestly, with all the poor population that India has, how further aggressive and strong can the nation at all get? BJP never did permit this thought to come up anytime during their entire six years’ rule. Their whole idea was simply to evade the issue. If the Americans engaged in pressure tactics, sacrificial men like Ajit Jadhav (me) were handy. (I have read Shourie talk about the kind of follow-up he faced in Indira Gandhi’s rule. My question to him is: Will he face up to me—i.e., face up the description of the kind of follow-up that I have suffered when his party was in the rule? (And it’s not just me—my family suffered too, alongwith me.) And what “guaruntees” can he have to offer that the performance won’t be repeated should his party come in power in the next general elections? On what basis? As to the communists, it was not at all surprising that they would oppose any form of cooperation with the Americans. But what this episode showed us was the essential identity of the basic wordview—defined by collectivism, altruism, mysticism and intrinsicism—which is shared by both the left (communists) and the right (BJP). Congress may only be a “muddle in the middle.” Sure. But compared to these two camps, Congress does, indeed, come out far too better—despite actually being a “muddle”. (Very apt description, that was, though I don’t know where and when I read it first. But I loved the expression… In terms of aptness, it competes with, but still is not as delightful as the “teflon” analogy for “nothing [bad] sticks onto [some politician].”) More on this all—I mean, politics and not communication—later. (I need to explain why I say they share the basic worldview, and how. So far, I have only stated that they do—without any explanation.) Pending work…
• Incidentally, politics really does not interest me all that much. I have been busy with computational engineering and quantum mechanics. But before I come to it, I also want to note, before I forget to mention, that I think it is high time that Sharad Pawar became prime minister. To my mind, he is eminently well suited for the job. Stronger: He would make an extremely competent PM. But the thing that I wish to really discuss is not the question of why he should become a PM. The more interesting question is: Why has he not already become one? Sharad Pawar’s qualifications for the job are so obvious that the second question is far more interesting than the first one. I plan to discuss it one of these days here. And, no, to my mind, this is neither an affront to Dr. Manmohan Singh, nor a lessening of the admiration that I do have for that gentleman. … It also does not mean I give up my right to criticize Mr. Sharad Pawar’s decision or even some of his policies. … The politics in India has sunk to such low levels that one has to issue such clarifications.  But, anyway, I will certainly write on this topic—the second question—one of these days… Hope to find time, though!
• And, now, about quantum mechanics.  I do have an announcement about a proposed Study Group for self-studies of QM, already posted at my Web site; see http://www.JadhavResearch.info/training.htm

I will expand these points one by one (in no particular order) as time goes on… But I really don’t find time for blogging as much as I would like to…

PS: The results of the test of astrology, conducted by the “Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti,” are out. I had participated in it as an “amateur”—though, as I said here in my blogs earlier, I do not believe in astrology. I do have something to add concerning the nature of the test—it was not a very well designed test, if you ask me. But then, on the other hand, I also have a few further things to add as to why astrology just cannot be a science… More on these things too, later.