Ramanujan Redux

Read this post by Razib this weekend, and it got me thinking, which is always a bad sign. It usually means something stupid’s about to come out of my mouth, so bear with me.

One thing that Razib points out is the fundamental difference between gender and genre. Males enjoy plot-driven stories, escapist fiction. We don’t want to focus on characters and their development, we want storyline and plot. Get to the point, get to the next point, etc. Women enjoy more of the character development stuff, the writing prose, etc. etc.

So I was wondering–is our interest in certain books wired into our own primitive desires? Do we like certain books because they fire up a part of our own evolutionary structure?

Think about it. Men enjoy plot-based books, with an aura of mystery but also of adventure and exploration. Books have the power to take us away. It takes us away from the burden of work and responsibility, provides us refuge from the toil we endure. We have traditionally been the ones to carry the load for our families, and while the gender gap has made dramatic shifts in the past 200 years, our brains don’t evolve nearly as fast.

Just like the supposed theory that our bodies have supposedly not caught up to agricultural products toxifying our body, our brains have not yet fully caught up to the idea that women can now bear equal responsibility, so it takes our own growth and development in life to adjust to this. Because of the growing amount of entertainment options in the Internet age and the relegation of books to a niche activity among the XYs, many of us never do.

Women, on the other hand, have traditionally been groomed to find mates. Unlike male, whose work, intelligence, wealth, and physical stature defined him, a female was traditionally defined by the strength of her partner. So it became important for her to find that character, and that required deep examination of human psychology to attract suitable mates. So isn’t it natural that females would enjoy books that involved deep character study and soothing words of comfort and seduction?

(Another possibility is that if females were not happy with the mates they got, they could dream up their ideal Cassanova to escape the doom and gloom of their situation. Hence the continuing popularity of harlequin novels for women in completely unsatisfying marriages.)

I’m not sure how far I’ve gotten, but the last work of fiction I read was Kafka on the Shore, and it touched me so profoundly because of how mystical and otherworldly it was. I felt like I was being transferred away from this world and into a dream. It was…liberating. I certainly felt like I was in another world, and didn’t have to worry about the one I was in now.

Sound familiar?

There’s my crock theory. Someone please tear it apart.

No. And yes.

I don’t really love anything about Berkeley. I mean, the weather’s nice, but it gets a little chilly–do you enjoy the occasional 50 degree night in July? The students find their own groups pretty quickly, so making new friends is largely dependent on the friends you make your freshman year. The food’s decent and diverse (it’s nice to have five Indian restaurants within a few blocks), but come on, is La Burrita all you can do for Mexican?

And as for professors, I’ve been underwhelmed. This might have something to do with choosing a slightly antiquated major (I love math, but I seldom meet a math major I want to coerce with) where it’s none too easy to find accessible professors and interesting research (they’re there, but you have to look hard, and after awhile you kind of give up when you realize you have no idea what they’re talking about).

It’s not a big deal for me; I’ve accepted those things and have to tried to expand my reach. But when you do that, something interesting begins to happen–you panic. You don’t know what’s coming next. You’re walking out into the dark. These are uncharted waters, and you have to be prepared to sink or swim for your life.

But slowly you find something else you like doing. And then something else. And maybe something you don’t like, and you eliminate it quickly. And you keep on trying new and new things, until you reach the place you want to be the legend you’re trying to pursue. You probably don’t get there now, or when you graduate, or even years after your house parties. But you know if you keep on pursuing it, you’ll find it.

So while I don’t really love this place, I appreciate what it’s done to me. It’s re-educated me on what’s important and what really matters, about what it means to actually gain an education. That it’s more than just the grades. That it takes a lifetime to figure out who you are and what you want. You’ll be treated the way you treat others; If you are too shy to seek out help, you’ll be ignored in return; if you can’t respect yourself, who else will; if you start bringing your full effort every day, slowly you will reap the rewards of your work, etc. etc. You learn all these lessons and more once you distance yourself from the filler and take control of your life.

In short, Berkeley has prepared me for reality. So after my time at Cal is done here, I’m ready for what lies beyond. That’s what I love.

I might have had a better time at Caltech or Stanford, getting pampered and bestowed the gifts of the privates. But I’d still be walking in the dark.

Do you love your college? Why or why not?

When I go through a struggling phase, people always wonder why exactly it is. You have all this talent don’t you? You’re really smart, can’t you see your way out? Don’t you have the means to dig yourself out of the hole you’re in?

Maybe I do have talent, maybe I don’t. That isn’t the problem that stops me from working. It’s that between all the varying and interesting options available to me, I can’t choose. I get stuck in a rut. I get stuck in classes I’d rather not take. And trapped in activities whose marginal cost has dropped below zero. And the paradox is that you feel obligated to run those commitments out or face the condemnation of your peers–not that it matters in the long run, but you don’t want bad decisions to become bad habits. You enter a sort of decision-making paralysis, where your own mind feels constrained and unable to act.

And the worst part is when you get out of these ruts, find yourself ready to enter a new frontier–and you’re not really sure how to deal with it, and the time starts slipping away. This is the age of the Internet, the information overload. More ‘friends’, more email and IM (the real demons), more social norms and taboos, more meaningless tasks, etc.–all of this puts an inevitable drag on your productivity, your lifestyle, your choices.

So what is the solution? I can’t say I’ve arrived at it yet (and won’t get at it for another month), but there’s one genuine tool I’ve arrived at.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Say you take the task that you enjoy doing the most and you have some experience at it (whether it be writing, problem solving, cooking, whatever). Then pour yourself into it unlike anything else you’ve ever done. Don’t let anything stop you from completing that goal everyday before moving onto the other necessary tasks that have to get done. Put what you desire over everything and it can get accomplished. That is the American spirit–the ability to seize your destiny and to take the risks that’ll get you to where you want to be without ending up in a gutter.

Let go. Focus on the things that you want to work on the most, whether it be a subject, a passion, a sport, dating, whatever. Make your life your career. And don’t let anything stand in your way–not jealous peers, not uncomprehending parents, etc.

This path isn’t for everyone. Some people can work fine in the systems provided for them because they are institutional beings, or they’ve learned how to be hard workers within the system. It has become a lifestyle for them, and this is admirable. But I doubt all people are like this. Some want a way out of the preordained path set for them. You need to assess which path is right for you and make that decision before things get much harder after college and beyond. Otherwise the road becomes difficult, and I’m not the one who can help you.

But as for me? I feel myself inexorably pulled toward following this path rather than fulfilling long-lasting commitments. The world is changing frenetically, and I feel myself changing right along with it.

Even 90 years later, we still talk about him. Via Slashdot (although those morons spelled his name wrong in the title):

Jake’s Mom sends word of the serendipitous solution to a decades-old mathematical mystery. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin have unraveled a major number theory puzzle left at the death of one of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan. From the press release:

“Mathematicians have finally laid to rest the legendary mystery surrounding an elusive group of numerical expressions known as the ‘mock theta functions.’ Number theorists have struggled to understand the functions ever since… Ramanujan first alluded to them in a letter written [to G. H. Hardy] on his deathbed, in 1920. Now, using mathematical techniques that emerged well after Ramanujan’s death, two number theorists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have pieced together an explanatory framework that for the first time illustrates what mock theta functions are, and exactly how to derive them.”
I’m not at the point where I can describe amply how much I appreciate Ramanujan. I’ll come back to it in the near-future, but trust me, he’s meant a lot in re-examining how I educate myself in the world. He has a big impact on my future plans. Which you’ll hear more about over the coming years.

Ramanujan’s Deathbed Problem Cracked [Slashdot]

It’s funny how when we’ve finally come to peace with who we are, we always have to make decisions about what has to stay and what has to go.

Classes, schedules, grades, used to be the fibre of my being, things that I attended to no matter how shitty the teacher or sleep-inducing the class or painful the material. For the past few years though, I’ve been slowly chipping at the dirt. Skip a class here, skip a class there. Not because I necessarily didn’t want to go, but because I had no incentive to go. I know this material. I can get this done on my own. I have the Internet and the knowledge of the world at my hands. Why should I be wasting time doing things I don’t care about? I CAN LEARN THIS BETTER BY MYSELF.

Of course, punk-ass me paid for this in blood. Well, metaphorical, academic blood, but the seas ran red in my land quickly enough. My parents weren’t happy, and I wasn’t ready to learn on my own, and I felt trapped. What will I do now? Am I going to drop out of school? Is this not for me? Am I really going to be stuck in my family house ten years from now eating stale pizza and playing Starcraft with hyperactive Koreans?

It took awhile to understand what was holding me back, until I discovered more about how the brain works. I was still stuck in this mindset, this rut of respecting my elders, going to their classes to secure their fragile egos and justify their existence and my parents’ spending on it. It wasn’t exactly mental procrastination, but more so paradigm shifting.

We’re so used to one way of living, we’re not really ready to embrace changing over to another. And to be frank, I’m still not there. I half-complete or don’t complete assignments for classes depending on how I feel, and my schedule is still completely out of whack. But at least I’m doing things, compared to the past year, where I did practically nothing with myself but dawdle.

Speaking of teachers, going through all the years, my favorite teacher didn’t come from college or from high school. It was my middle school math teacher, who allowed me free reign on all the nerdy aspects of problem solving. Contest booklets and irrelevant problems led to freedom of mind and fluidity of form. I tried balancing that with middle school work as best as I can, but I always felt myself teetering back to what was really enjoyable rather than what wasn’t fun at all. Looking back, the only thing I regret is not spending more time on the things I enjoyed rather than the meaningless shit that needed to get done for my filler classes. Embracing that philosophy sooner would have avoided a lot of miscellaneous bullshit.

Now I find myself at a crossroads, at how to go about the rest of my college life. Do I put my effort fully into projects and interests, or spare it until college ends? A year ago, I would have said classes. Six months ago, I would have said get your fucking As and get on with your life. Even two months ago I didn’t know if I had to confidence to pursue what I really wanted.

But now it’s time to begin. I’ve never believed in setting things aside this early. We only have so many opportunities until we narrow them down and trap them in certain careers. The time is NOW for change, so it’s time to start doing what I really want, rather than doing what will satisfy the corporate or academic worlds into finding an ample career path.

There’ll be big happenings coming here (for you and for myself), and my classes will finally be taking second wing, like it should have from the start. My grades might go into the tank, but that doesn’t mean anything except that I don’t like being held to the rigidity of assignments and tests and what not. No more worrying about grades, majors and careers. For now, just LEARN.

(From a response to a blog post of a friend, found here.)
Sometimes you just get to a point where your own needs clash with your own wants and desires. We long for security and are afraid to take risks to break that security. When we enter something that provides us temporal comfort, then we want to keep at it. It’s a natural human emotion, a progression in our learning. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, we’ve all gone through it at one point or another.

Criticism comes in all shapes and forms. There is no right way to achieve a higher state of self-realization, but ultimately the desire to change needs to come from you. Although a sharp elucidation might be the most vivid way to illustrate mistakes, I’m sure you can think of other times and other points where you’ve had similar insights and beliefs, and certainly could have gotten them confirmed in a less pointed manner. You dwell on these attacks rather than acting to correct yourself.

To provide an example, my father had always been my biggest critic about my work performance in high school and early in college, my inability to communicate properly, etc. etc. But I was resistant to follow his belief that I should pursue what it is that I treasured, instead drilling down a career path that I really wasn’t sure I wanted to follow. Then I careened down a path of utter misery and self-isolation that I realized I was just not paying heed to the things that I needed to provide myself purpose and happiness. So I started thinking about what made me happy (hard work toward a particular goal) and went about trying to mirror that image for the present, and after months of searching for that goal, I’m slowly anchoring out of the pit and beyond. It’s hard to even describe how things are now. Just…liberating. The view towards self-awareness can come from without, but the change has to come from within.

It’s astonishing how much you can change when you stop worrying about every little nook and cranny, micro or macro. We’re humans, we’re flesh, we fuck up, we move on. Where we end up, who knows. All we know is when we’re in a place we don’t want to be, we want to get out. And we do eventually. Usually alive. If we are, it’s just a matter of how long and how wounded.

So anyway, take what you’ve learned and keep on going at it. Think about the times when you were at your happiest and most confident and try to replicate how you went about your life then to the here and now, and adjust accordingly whenever you trudge upon discord. You’d be amazed how far you can go.

Whatever happened to that?

I’ve always wanted to do things the way that made me feel the most content, the most happy, but too often it seems I’m making compromises with myself, because people keep on telling me something like this: Careers. Workforce. Paying off college debt. Grad School. Industry. Resume. And the like.

Wasn’t I supposed to escape this bullshit in high school? Everyone always wanted to add stuff onto their list of “Things they’ve done”, with one more club, one sport, one more activity. We didn’t necessarily do it because we like it, we did it because we thought that’s how we would succeed.

But college is not high school, especially not in Berkeley. Here we are pushed to do more activities and cover classes that take up far more time then your average high school filler. We are supposed to give ourselves time to fill in part-time jobs to help pay off our college debt and prepare us for the horror of reality. We obsess over every point on our midterms, as if one point less is a determinant for our own self-worth. We get drunk or do whatever we do on the weekends with the same friends and the same people because it makes us feel secure and gives us a net that protects us from uncertainty and risk-taking. By the time we are done and graduated, we’ve had so little time to reflect. We don’t realize how much better we could have done if we just weren’t pushed into choosing our career paths based on the wrong reasons (money, stability, whatever).

Then finally, if we don’t postpone reality with grad school or what-not, we sell ourselves off to the highest bidder in the frighteningly homogeneous workplace, where our creativity and productivity are inevitably monopolized, cauterized, and destabilized. Does that sound like fun?

So again, where did the learning go? Why can’t we just learn for its own sake?

Where has the passion gone? Why must we all be in a rush to get out into the world? Why do we think money is the only means toward satisfaction? Why don’t we just relax and let go of our worries and insecurities? (These are all rhetorical of course)

***

It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do, and in some ways, I still haven’t. I used to think I wanted to be a math major, go to grad school in math, be the next Ramanujan, do some nice proofs over a few years, win a Fields Medal. Lofty? Yeah, but I always set the bar high. After getting through the mundaneness of high school, I thought this was all I had for me, so I narrowed my field of vision.

Then slowly, I started to realize that I wasn’t really thrilled at the prospect of doing this the rest of my life. I didn’t really enjoy the lifestyle of doing proofs all the time, reestablishing old truths simply because they already existed. All the fun of problem solving had been beaten out and been replaced by something more systematic, or just a reconfirmation that the systems that had been established were working. If that makes sense. So I’m getting that damned major, but I still don’t have a clue as to what I’m going to do with it.

Then I tried Physics. A little bit more appeal, but again something was missing here. Although I didn’t like total abstraction that I found in math, I was a little bit out of sync with this material too. Physicists are fucking intimidating people. I sat in on a graduate seminar and was completely overwhelmed. I always think I never gave physics enough of a chance, but for the moment I’m on hiatus.

Slowly it’s coming to me that I don’t really fit in any major in general. Majors are just a beginning, a sketch of what it takes not only to succeed and be happy. Any Joe Schmo who gets a B.A. degree can succeed if they know the right people, and any dipshit who flips burgers at McDonalds can be quite happy since they really don’t have much to aspire for other than making a decent living. Getting both is the toughie. It’s the ultimate goal I aspire for these next few years.

So here I am adrift in where I’m going with my life, but at least I’ve learned more about myself. And sometimes self-awareness is the greatest gift one can find. Certainly better than those stupid Valentine’s Day gifts.