Galois

Another play from the festival. They began with a brilliant pocket history of the French revolution (including mime and puppets). They made a valiant run at the mathematics involved, writing quadratic, cubic, quartic, and quintic equations on the blackboard. But not even a straightedge and compass. If King Louis can get a puppet, can't field theory get one too?

The play puts forward the theory that Galois sacrificed himself to foment revolution, ignoring his own reference to a duel over a woman in his last letter. But it did inspire me to reread the history.

The scene where Cauchy dismisses Galois's work as incomprehensible reminded me of too many reviews I had written. But one of my students took the story to heart, saying that it drove home how it is not enough to have an idea, it is just as vital to communicate it!

Ravenhill for Breakfast

One of the joys of living in Edinburgh is the annual festival. My favorite play this year was Ravenhill for Breakfast at the Traverse Theatre. This was part of a series of seventeen short plays written for the festival, I saw number fourteen, which is linked to above.

Haskell Coffin

On the walls at Jane Street, I spotted this work by an artist I had not heard of before, Haskell Coffin.

Jane Street

I visited Jane Street Capital 15--17 August to see the reports from their OCaml Summer Project. Olin Shivers was there too. An excellent time was had by all. I enjoyed speaking in a room filled by clever people interested in FP not in order to write an academic paper, but because they have a large pile of money that they want to make larger.

Four vacancies

Julian Bradfield, head of LFCS, writes:

We have just advertised the first four of what will, it is hoped,
ultimately be ten posts funded via SICSA (a.k.a. "pooling").

Three of the four are areas in which LFCS has an interest, so please
communicate the existence of these posts to anyone or any community
you know where good candidates may be found.

The announced topics are:

• Software Engineering
  
• Modelling/Concurrency
  
• Security
  
• Large Scale and Robust Natural Language Processing
  

and each post may be at Lecturer or Reader level, depending on the
applications.

The official ad is at the link above.

Note that there is a single vacancy reference, so applicants should
make clear the post(s) they wish to apply for.

Functional languages on NearlyFreeSpeech.net

Haskell, Lisp, OCaml, and Scheme (as well as C, C++, Fortran, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl) are the languages supported by NearlyFreeSpeech.net, a web hosting company. I enjoyed reading their FAQ.

Real-World Haskell

A forthcoming O'Reilly book on Haskell, by Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen. Interestingly, O’Reilly has agreed to publish chapters online, under a Creative Commons License. (Great that they managed to achieve this, O'Reilly was reluctant to consider something similar when Maurice and I proposed it for our book.)

Festschrift for John C. Reynolds’s 70th birthday

Edited by Olivier Danvy, Peter O’Hearn and Philip Wadler. The community says Thank You to John Reynolds for a lifetime of inspiring ideas. Happy birthday, John!

Reith Lectures 2007

Taking his lead from John Kennedy's precept 'Peace is a Process', in the 2007 Reith Lectures, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, lays out a system of initiatives that government, institutions, and citizens can follow to achieve peace, limit climate change, and reduce economic inequality. In the last lecture, he claims a special place for scientists to organize to solve the world's ills, and cites Wikipedia and Linux as a model---a sort of Open Source government. Heady stuff; it's not often one encounters this scope of vision. The lectures are delivered from London, Beijing, New York, and (for the finale) Edinburgh, home of Adam Smith and the Enlightenment.

Oh no! Alligators!

One of my great joys on visiting Berkeley was to meet Bret Victor, of Magic Ink fame. I mentioned to him that I had been working with a student on a visual lambda calculus, in part because I wanted a way to explain lambda calculus to my eight-year old daughter and son. He responded with a game involving alligators and their eggs, such a clever morphing of lambda calculus that it wasn't until I reached the end that I realized exactly what was going on.

So far, I've had a chance to show it to my daughter, who managed to successfully solve the problem at the end. She guessed a definition of 'not', and then applied 'not' to 'true' and checked that the result is 'false'. But she was most interested in drawing pictures of alligators! I expect it would be more fun to use if there was software that implemented the game.

Bret also pointed to David Keenan's graphical lambda calculus, based on Raymond Smullyan's "To Mock a Mockingbird".