On communication and Google+

I am bad at communication. Here is what I have observed:

I reply well when messages are short, informal and don't require much structure or thought. Emails with some people are easy, if I feel like we are on the same wavelength, can speak briefly and to the point, use shorthand we both understand etc. I reply quickly to Sam, my podcast collaborator, with whom I have email exchanges like: "Saturday?" "Yep." "7pm my time?" "Sure." Twitter also fits into this category. Short, informal messages with an interface that works well on my phone are easy to reply to.

I don't reply well to more in depth messages. It's not that I have a problem with writing in sentences and thinking complex thoughts, it's mostly a question of immediacy. I can knock out a quick email easily on my phone on the bus, or as a quick aside to the piece of work I am really doing on my computer. If I have to think about a reply, it goes on my to do pile, which is a strange and disturbing realm from which nothing returns. Emails sink down my inbox screen with alarming speed. Following recent unavailability, I have fallen far behind. Work days at the moment are a struggle with the most urgent work while my undealt-with email pile is fast approaching 1000. (Will it self destruct when it reaches four digits?) Having such a large, looming unknown in my life is quite disconcerting. I hope the quiet summer will give me time to catch up.

Of course, when an issue is too big for a tweet and a twitterer changes to email, they discover the forgotten realm of my inbox. If it was too big for a tweet, it is too big for a short, quick email and I've added it to the pile. (This isn't deliberate, and I'm annoyed with myself about it. But, you see, if I don't sort out this thing by tomorrow I'm going to miss that deadline...)

Where does Facebook fit? I find Facebook annoying. People send private messages which are basically like long emails but appear in a different place so I can't reply so easily. I don't find it as easy to quickly dip in and read something interesting, or engage with someone's quick message because the web interface has more junk going on and the service doesn't work so nicely on my phone. I'm fed up of meeting people and having conversations like: "You know my ?" "Really, wow, congratulations!" "What? But surely you knew? I did post it on my Facebook wall." (Yes, really.) Originally I refused to sign up to Facebook and only did so once I started working for the IMA and we were starting a group. Now I no longer work in that sort of area, should I get off Facebook? I'm really tempted.

Into this picture steps Google+. Again I resisted the first attempts to get me on it but I've been using it for three weeks now. I sort of like it. I don't have to worry about abbreviating myself to 140 characters like on Twitter but there is still an expectation of short, quick updates. I'm not constantly asked to play games and other stuff. And people can reply in a way that keeps the conversation together better than Twitter. Still, there's something about it that isn't quite clicking with me. It may be the lack of people on there, which will be fixed in time. I'm still not quite sure.

Looking for a place for Google+ in this mess of my online communications feels a bit like having a problem at one end and having a solution at the other and trying to fit the one to the other even though they don't go together. Still, Christian Perfect suggested Google+ was a better place for conversations around the Math/Maths Podcast. I regularly ask on Twitter 'What's happened in your mathematical world this week?' Christian is suggesting I could collect the replies more sensibly on Google+. Further than this, I wondered if I might put up one or two stories and see if anyone had any comments on them that I could collect that way.

So I'm going to give it a try. Take a look at this week's messages on my Google+ page - one about The Code and maths communication, the other asking for news from your mathematical week. Now, I'm off to tweet that I put up a new blog post...

Hints about Relatively Prime

Although we all know Samuel Hansen will do a fantastic job telling stories behind mathematics, provided you donate some money to help him do so, we don't entirely know what those stories will be. Here are a list of tweets I've seen on Samuel's Twitter stream about this, giving hints.

help me tell people how crickets led to a better understanding of Kevin Bacon through math

Why does it seems that 20% of your friends get you 80% of your news?

Can slime molds make Steiner trees?

Networks are the basis of our social lives & what I'm trying to leverage to support my Kickstarter Relatively Prime

True story: It take 362 pages to prove 1+1=2. Find out more by Supporting the Relatively Prime Kickstarter.

Can a war over a math discovery make a country to fall years behind in science?

Ever wonder what how a river and logic could both lead to the same mathematical discovery?

Wondering if you can musically represent a function? Support Relatively Prime and I will have the chance to answer

Parallel lines intersect at exactly two points! Find out why this is true by supporting Relatively Prime.

The shape of the Internet is hyperbolic. And if you want to know why support my kickstarter Relatively Prime

Plus there's the original hint on the Kickstarter page:

is it true that you are only 7 seven handshakes from the President, what exactly is a micromort, and how did 39 people commenting on a blog manage to prove a deep theorem ... With each episode structured around topics such as: The Shape of Things, Risk, and Calculus Wars, Relatively Prime will illuminate each area by delving into the history, applications, and people that underlie the subject that is the foundation of all science

So if you haven't got the message yet, find out about these stories by supporting Relatively Prime. My previous post focused on ways you can help as well as donating, including a ready-written blog post for you to put on your blog.

Relatively Prime is failing; what you can do to help

Trying to study mathematics without the human stories is like reading a typed transcript of a Rolling Stones concert. The Relatively Prime project will throw the mathematics television out of the hotel window.

On Friday as I was going to bed I sent a message to Samuel Hansen, try to think of anything we could do to promote Relatively Prime on the Math/Maths podcast this week. By Saturday he had five people who had sent him audio recordings of their reasons for supporting, which he had edited into a 1 min advert for the Kickstarter fundraising project (the quote at the top of this article is from one of those funders). We then had a chat in which I asked Samuel about the project, what sorts of stories he was going to tell, what made it different from other podcasts he does. The result is in the latest Math/Maths Podcast 57 and has been released as an 8 minute audio piece through the acmescience podcasts. Listen to the funders' reasons and our conversation here.

I've become quite vexed with the process of promoting this. If you look at Samuel's twitter stream you can see him tweeting intriguing questions that will be answered by Relatively Prime. A sample of three:

Can a war over a math discovery make a country to fall years behind in science?...Can slime molds make Steiner trees? I'll tell you if you support my Kickstarter Relatively Prime...help me tell people how crickets led to a better understanding of Kevin Bacon through math

I thought this was a neat idea and ReTweeted these when I saw them. This, and other marketing Samuel is doing, is attracting interest and, as the graph of donations, cumulative amount and time shows, there is a steady increase but it simply isn't increasing quickly enough (click to enlarge).


It amazes me that 93 people have so far donated $3,793, but we have a problem. If the whole amount isn't raised, all donations are cancelled. That's the way Kickstarter works. So it's a question of reaching new audiences. Samuel can keep tweeting, and I can keep tweeting on his behalf, but the message isn't getting further out. I already posted on this blog about the project - "Why I supported Relatively Prime and you should too" - and according to Blogger some 250 people have viewed that post. So I'm running out of new audiences to reach.

This is where you come in. If you haven't donated to Relatively Prime, please consider chipping in some money. Small amounts sum to larger amounts, so even a small amount will help. There are only eight days to go.

If you have donated, please have a think - is there anything you can do to help promote the project. Post a message on whichever social networks you use. Put a message on your blog. It doesn't have to be as elaborate as this one! Here's some text you could use for a quick blog post:

Relatively Prime: Stories from the Mathematical Domain

Relatively Prime will be an 8 episode audio podcast featuring stories from the world of mathematics. Tackling questions like: is it true that you are only 7 seven handshakes from the President, what exactly is a micromort, and how did 39 people commenting on a blog manage to prove a deep theorem. Relatively Prime will feature interviews with leaders of mathematics, as well as the unsung foot soldiers that push the mathematical machine forward. With each episode structured around topics such as: The Shape of Things, Risk, and Calculus Wars, Relatively Prime will illuminate each area by delving into the history, applications, and people that underlie the subject that is the foundation of all science.

I think this could really be an amazing project, but it can only happen with your support. So please, if you can, support it financially, or please twitter, tumblr, reddit, blog, or any other thing about it - you can use the nice link http://bit.ly/relprime

Please just take that block of text - title and 2 paragraphs - and paste it on your own blog. It should only take you seconds and by doing so you will help break the message out of the same circles and reach new, interested people.

Plus, if you have any ability to get something written or an audio interview released though any sort of outlet in the next week please contact Samuel Hansen and give him the opportunity to talk about his project. You get some interesting content for your podcast/radio show/magazine/whatever and you'll be helping Relatively Prime.

The unplanned impact of mathematics

Time and again, pure mathematics displays an astonishing quality. A piece of mathematics is developed (or discovered) by a mathematician who is, often, following his or her curiosity without a plan for meeting some identified need or application. Then, later, perhaps decades or centuries later, this mathematics fits perfectly into some need or application.

I have recently been interested in this idea, particularly as research funding bodies have been increasingly asking researchers to predict the impact of their research before it is funded, and research quality is being measured partly by its short term impact. On this issue I spoke to more and more research mathematicians and a pattern started to emerge: mathematicians tend to think of this aspect of mathematics as axiomatic, and generally come up with one of the same three examples to justify this position - number theory in cryptography, logic in computing and complex numbers in fluid mechanics.

This made me a little concerned. If every research mathematician you speak to comes up with the same few examples, is the story going to be sufficiently convincing?

I decided there must be mathematicians out there who have less well known examples of mathematics having impact that could not have been planned by the original discoverer - unplanned impact of mathematics. This might be mathematics pursued for curiosities sake, or that had a direct application and was later found to have a different, unexpected one.

Acting in my position as a member of the Council of the British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM), I put out a call for further examples. The BSHM has charitable aims around promoting awareness, knowledge and study of the history of mathematics. I spotted a win-win: BSHM could raise awareness of the history of our subject and, in turn, provide researchers with a greater range of examples to call on.

This began a slightly unreal process, particularly when one of my contributors, Edmund Harriss, was able to put me in touch with Nature, who were interested in taking a set of seven contributions.

The field of topology provides an illustrative example. This was started by Euler and studied for 250 years as a purely theoretical discipline before, in the last two decades, finding applications as diverse – and alien to Euler – as DNA, galaxy formation and robotics. These applications rely on the 250 years of pure research, but those advances would not have been made if the researchers had to justify the planned impact before studying their mathematics.

In technology, quaternions, a 19th century discovery which seemed to have no practical value, have turned out to be invaluable to the 21st century computer games industry, while work on the best way to stack oranges started by Kepler in 1611 is essential to modern telecommunications.

Einstein’s theory of relativity, which seemed to come as a spark of genius from nowhere, nevertheless drew on abstract geometry developed half a century earlier. Fourier’s theory of vibrating strings, via very abstract mathematics in the 20th century, has now yielded new insights into quantum physics.

Gambling on 16th century dice games led to a discovery in mathematical probability that is crucial to the insurance industry, while a recent insight into a quantum theory thought experiment has unexpectedly found applications in the outbreak of viral disease and the risks associated with stock market volatility.

These seven examples, contributed by Julia Collins (topology), Mark McCartney and Tony Mann (quarternions), Edmund Harriss (stacking oranges), Graham Hoare (Einstein's geometry), Chris Linton (Fourier analysis), Juan Parrondo and Noel-Ann Bradshaw (Parrondo's paradox) and me (dice games), appear in the 14th July 2011 issue of Nature. Go and get a copy and see for yourself!

I'd still like to hear more examples of mathematics displaying this astonishing quality, and I am exploring options to distribute these. You can send me yours - the details are on the BSHM website.

Update 22:15: Link to the article in Nature. Hear me talking about this on the Nature Podcast - you can access the podcast using the following player. The unplanned impact bit starts at 08:44 (though listen to the rest, of course!).

Update 15/07/11 08:20: I recorded a segment for podcast the Pod Delusion, 15th July 2011. Listen to it all, of course, but my bit starts at 19:10.

Update 18/07/11 08:36: Edmund Harriss joined Samuel Hansen and I and we spoke about The unplanned impact of mathematics for Math/Maths Podcast 56: The unplanned impact of mathematics.

Update 25/01/12: Tim Harford wrote a column in the FT on this on 24th September: New ways with old numbers (also on FT.com).