Maurer/Stier 2009 Annual Letter
smaurer1@swarthmore.edu
http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/smaurer1/
franstier@comcast.net http://burbaldiaries.blogspot.com/
Leon.N.Maurer.08@alum.dartmouth.org https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/lnmaurer/web/
206 Benjamin West Ave
Swarthmore PA 19081-1421
December 31, 2009
(postdated!)
Steve writes. My first annual letter was from fall 1973, the first
semester of my postdoc in Canada.
I was very invested in every aspect of the letter that year, even buying
many denominations of Canadian stamps to mix and match on the envelopes. For many years after that, I was so
eager about the letter that I devoted Thanksgiving vacation to writing it
– that was the vacation for me.
But in recent years writing it has gotten later and later. Last year I
was the last to write my part (Jan 10); this year I was first (Dec 28), but I
didn't feel particularly inspired to write – it was simply easier than
grading more papers! In part, there is nothing particularly remarkable to write
about.
Last
year I was overwhelmed by math/stat chair work from day 1. I didn't really catch up until March.
This year, through luck (or maybe because I haven't minded letting some things not
get done) it hasn't been as bad.
Like all colleges and universities that depend heavily on large
endowments, we have been hurt. Not
as badly as most others, because our investment policy was more conservative,
but it doesn't matter whether you are cutting $1 million or $100 million,
cutting anything is hard and puts departments in competition. The main way this
is hurting math/stat is that we have a wonderful Latino postdoc who, in better
times, would have been converted to a new tenure line already. But even vacated old tenure lines are
currently frozen, so I have been fighting to figure out some way to keep him.
The
real time sink has been my volunteer activity, MathPath. I explained last year that, in addition
to being academic director, I had gotten involved in the financial end. It was nerve racking last winter, since
we were heavily in debt and not sure, with the falling economy, whether we could
round up enough students. In the
end we got somewhat more students than the year before, and through cost
cutting made a sizeable dent in our debts. More exciting than that, I think last summer in Colorado
Springs was the best camp ever: the campers were really happy and
productive. How do I know? Because 3 years ago I started collecting
surveys and quotes, both from students and parents. The result is that we are trying to leverage that good buzz,
and this has gotten me involved in even more aspects of running the camp. I am now a web content manager,
brochure designer, publicist, direct mailer, grant writer, and chief goad to
get everything out the door much earlier than in past years. (I do not claim I have done these
things by myself, nor is it the case I did none of this before, but I am taking
a leadership role that I didn't take before. Check out our website at
www.mathpath.org.) I hope it all
pays off. We are trying a new
location, Macalester College in St Paul MN. Oh, did I mention that I am also a site
visitor and contract negotiator, having negotiated seriously with 3 potential
sites and negotiated some with several more. Not to mention psychologist,
keeping our sometimes unyielding senior staff working together. Also a legal
and tax consultant (with the aid of my brother Ed). MathPath takes up all my
spare time, including thinking time in the shower. But it may be the best thing I have ever done.
Oh,
I've become a political "designer" too. We live in what traditionally has been a very Republican
county, although it has been turning blue. 4 years ago I offered to buy bumper
stickers for Bryan Lentz, who looked like he had a shot running for State House
against a Republican incumbent of at least 20 years. Turns out his staff weren't going to buy any stickers for a
state race, but they were willing to let me buy them. They were a hit (250 were enough for the district), he won
the election, and I repeated the donation in 2008. But those two times they just gave me their design and I
passed it to the bumper sticker company I found online.
This
time we must meet federal regulations about what must be shown, there was
redesigning to do, and the campaign staff asked me to work with DemStore.com
and also negotiate for some buttons as well as stickers. So I ended up co-designing the stickers
and buttons with their contact person at DemStore.
Maybe
I have a potential retirement career as a business or political consultant.
Yes,
I am beginning to think about retirement – I'm 63 – and the fact
that these new endeavors capture my shower thinking time may be telling me
something. I am toying with the idea of doing something completely different in
retirement. My earlier predictions
(after my operations in 1994 and various newfound medical conditions around
that time) that I wouldn't have to worry about much retirement because I
wouldn't last that long – those predictions don't seem to be panning out.
Travel.
No overseas travel this year. We had a chance to join my extended
family on a Roots trip in June to Poland, but neither Fran nor I could fit it
in. How ironic, since the trip was pretty much due to me. It seems I never
reported on a major event in spring 2008 after I returned from Germany: I
finally went page by page through the boxes of genealogical materials my father
had worked up in the 1980s (stored
in my attic since his death), and with the help of now available online
resources was able to reconnect with some of his sources, push his discoveries
a little further, and identify what would be useful to do onsite at various
Polish towns and archives. My
brothers and families were able to do some of this; Leon represented us on the
trip and will report. Maybe I can
write a longer report about my father's fascinating work in a later annual.
Anyway,
with graduate students like Leon always spending most of the summer at school,
and Aaron choosing to work the summer at Carleton, the best Fran and I could do
was a trip to the Northwest, as follows:
1. I fly off to MathPath the
end of June;
2. A few days before MathPath
ends Fran flies to Madison, visits Leon, rents a car, drives to Northfield,
visits Aaron, drives to Minneapolis airport and catches a plane to Seattle;
3. Meanwhile MathPath ends and
I fly Colorado Springs – Denver – Seattle;
4. We spend a few days in
Seattle, then drive to Vancouver BC;
5. We drive back to Seattle,
where Fran catches a nonstop home;
6. I drive on to Portland,
where I attend the summer math meetings and check out Reed College for MathPath. Then I fly home from Portland.
Well,
it worked, but not smoothly. Due to fog in Denver, I missed my connection and
was told there were no open rebookings until the next day. I eventually got on
a flight on another airline that afternoon, but my luggage did not make it
until the next day. On top of that, we hit Seattle in its hottest weather ever – over 100. Our host's house,
like almost everything in the northwest, was not air-conditioned. Have I ever mentioned that Fran does
not like heat – or late husbands?
Anyway,
eventually everything worked out, but in terms of what we saw and did there was
nothing we would both rave about.
Nonetheless,
as usual let me recommend some personal highlights:
I've
put some photos up at http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/smaurer1/family.
Family.
Looking back on the days when we had kids in the house to tend to, I don't know
how I did it. These days I don't have much I have to do at home (except laundry
and cooking 4 nights a week), and yet almost every minute is taken up with work
or volunteer projects.
Closing
thoughts. We just signed a deal for many thousand dollars to replace all the
remaining original casement windows in our 1938 house. I love the look of the old casements
with individual square glass panes, but they are rusted, drip in cold weather,
don't close well, the panes crack occasionally, and of course they are not
energy efficient. A few weeks
before, we spent a chuck of money on a roof leak. After we get the windows in, it's time to paint the house exterior,
and after that parts of our interior. Perhaps we will jump-start the economy.
Since we are fortunate enough to have some money saved, I suppose noblesse
oblige. Anyway, I wish for you and us a better world in 2010.
Fran's Part: It's harder than it used to be to get started writing. Years ago, I had 100pp or so a year
worth of adorable diary entries about kids, and writing these annual letters
was mostly a matter of (proudly) picking out the funniest bits.
Now, except for the 4-6
weeks/year that Leon and Aaron are home, there are only weekly phone calls
(sometimes short) to go on. Steve
and I are empty nesters with grown-up sons.
Leon continues as a grad student in
physics at U Wisc in Madison – he passed his qualifying exams last spring. Lab time and problem sets took most of
the last year—he's finished with coursework now, so it's just lab
time. It's a fairly austere life.
He wasn't sure when
spring break was. I asked, wasn't
he heading to FL? Cancun, maybe,
he replied. In fact, he'll mostly
sleep, and read physics papers.
What abt wine, women & song, I asked? You always bring that up at around this point in the phone
call, don't you, he replied.
There's a weekend for prospective students coming up – that will
at least provide wine.
He cooks large amounts over the
weekend to eat over the week. One
week it was plov, the
Uzbeck national dish, featuring lamb, rice, and carrots. Uzbeck men gather and cook vats of the
stuff. (who knew?). Another week was an Egyptian mix of
lamb and okra. He tries not to
tell me about the dishes using pork.
Most of the times he's home, the
high point is a LAN party with friends from high school – he and his
friends spend the night drinking Red Bull & slaughtering virtual enemies:
L
has a bunch of his friends over for computer & board games. We had dinner w/ them (they eating
their chinese takeout, we eating our glops). One said his mother always bugged him about reading in the
dark. "you'll strain your
eyes". She's always giving him the
same admonitions:
"use
a condom" (this constantly, since he was 16. Mom, if only... he'd reply)
"Get
a master's degree"
"own
your own business"
"don't
strain your eyes"
Leon
said that he'd been trying to convince me for years that I was a nagging
outlierÉ
He has a huge fund of information
on the history of technology. Did
you ever hear about the
Current Wars in the late 1800's, between Thomas Edison & George
Westinghouse, over whether AC or DC was safer and more economical to produce
& transmit? Did you know
Edison electrocuted
an elephant to try to dramatize the dangers of AC? I certainly didn't.
Aaron is majoring in history &
math –& getting better grades.
He'd been taking Spanish to fulfill Carleton's language requirement, but
it wasn't going well and last winter he went through the language-aptitude
testing to get exempted from the requirement.
He spent spring break in CA
visiting Carleton friends. One
kid's family welcomed Aaron because they could never manage to eat enough to
meet the obligatory dining expenditures at their country club – he was
glad to help—including after-dinner cigars (cigars counting as part of
the meal tab).
He & his friend investigated
the La Brea tar pits (which I wrongly thought had dinosaurs in them, instead of
ice-age mammals, but he set me straight – it's our main source, since the
whole food chain's there). Each
link in the food chain saw entrapped prey and pounced, thinking: Dinner! And perished in turn.
Spring term, taking combinatorics,
Byzantine history, and Japanese
cinema, he liked all his courses; was working harder
Byz history: Prof North has them write 3 short papers on whatever strikes
them in the readings; A wrote a paper on a Byz emperor who, upon seeing a
soldier drop his shield, ordered that soldier's nose cut off. Soldier's commander refused, so he had
the commander's nose cut off. I
expressed distress. A replied that
was nothing; when Bulgarians rebelled, he ordered that 99 out of 100 have both
eyes put out, and the remaining one have one eye put out (so they could lead
the other 99).
He spent the summer in
Northfield, working as assistant to the Math department computer specialist and
renting a house with 4 friends.
Departing friends left them well equipped:
He's in a converted
garage in the house he rented w/ 3 other young men & Kate. There are surpluses of some things (6
TV's, 4 sofas, 8 mini-fridges), and shortages of others (mattresses) –
A's sleeping on a futon. Their
kitchen is well equipped, between things that departing students left (rice
cooker, 2 coffee machines) and the larder is well stocked because Kate scurried
around all the student kitchens clearing out the cupboards of spices &
staples before they got tossed.
A had to clear out two
sinks full of dirty dishes this morning – some of his housemates aren't
cleaning up after themselves muchÉ
In
addition to 8 mini-fridges and 4 sofas, they now have 2 gas grills (one from
curbside, one from neighbors), a panini press, and 4 coffee makers (three of
which are broken). Sam's parents,
visiting, bought the functioning coffee maker & a load of food. It's hard to keep enough food in the
house (what with 5 college students, 4 of them men).
Aaron's
enforced a dishwashing rotation, and is going to tackle getting his housemates
to take the trash out. Of the
people in the house, only he & Kate can cook much of anything.
He continues on the defensive
line: was sidelined for several
weeks by a sprained ligament in his knee and sat out the last couple weeks
after a concussion. I of course
was especially frantic with worry at the latter, but his Dr noted no ill
effects.
Steve (of course) has related most of
his own news, but I have to tell the saga of the Margined Blister Beetles. All through his month at MathPath, his
most eager questions are for his garden plot. When he finally returned in August, he sent out this
bulletin
Turns out I have an
infestation of margined blister beetles. While most blister beetles
prefer flowers, some (especially one subspecies) eat foliage.
Good thing I found out about them. Turns out they are medically
dangerous. If any of their internal fluid gets on you, you get bad
blisters. And if you eat them, you die. (Fortunately only adult
blister beetles eat plants, and adults are pretty big, so we are not likely to
eat them by accident, but dead blister beetles easily get into the cut hay for
horses, and kill the horses.) Also, they swarm from one area to another,
and they prefer tomatoes and beans (among the plants I grow), so if I just
leave them alone they might migrate to my other crops. So I am figuring
out what to do. I wonder why they latched onto the chard first?
Who knew?
Work has been stressful. We're flooded with consultants; no one
really knows what the future holds.
I set my computer desktop is a collage of tranquil hosta leaves, I
listened to a lot of Mozart while working, I worried that my hippocampus was withering
under a flood of glucocorticoids (see Why Zebras
Don't Get Ulcers)
I do experience studies now,
which is mostly about data problems.
Files appended in the wrong order that don't trigger the logic to create
death records. Software that won't
work right. Plancodes in katakana
(the Japanese alphabet used for foreign words) and hexadecimal representations of
katakana and how to convert the hex to katakana. Early in the year, I spent a lot of time persuading
colleagues to help me.
I had a fascinating
session with XX (who can calculate hexadecimals in his head). I had long talks with YY (a contract
programmer), and ZZ (the SQL server administrator), and then there was a long,
surprisingly passionate meeting where the three argued about how best to get
the files I worked with to show katakana. (the main point was, was it a problem
of transmission, where the katakana got garbled as the files were downloaded,
or were the katakana not on the main-frame to start with, only their
hexadecimal equivalents).
They collaborated on a C++
program to do the conversion.
After a while, I began to
understand the (badly documented) software that was supposed to do the studies,
and could coax it to work. I
learned to do some SQL (the files are so big we can only look at them in SQL
server). I hired two bright people with much better systems skills than
mine.
Synagogue life included some dramas
we'd rather have done without.
The school director was let go
midyear and left behind her vast quantities of themed stuffed animals, which we
used for Martin Luther King Day, when we hosted families from local shelters
bowling & lunch
She was huge on
themes for the year – this year had been cars & the Power of
Speech. There were toy cars &
pencil cases & sippy cups and fuzzy blankets, all with cars. There were also many, many stuffed
animals from prior years: frogs
(leap into Torah), giraffes (stick your neck out), M&Ms (God knows). ALL BRAND NEW. AND, she had 4 years more stashed in
the synagogue basement: cows, kitties.
EE .. pulled out the
contents of 5 huge cartons onto the library tables, muttering there were codes
in the DSM for this. The teens,
the next day, were charged with arranging the loot and coming up with an equitable
way to divide it among the Moms (I was afraid having kids in there would turn
it into a free-for-all). In fact,
our guests were amazingly orderly & sweet & the teen volunteers had a
ball running their free store and many a child left clutching a fuzzy new
animal.
The synagogue executive director,
hired a year ago, turned out not to be honest and resigned. Almost everyone on the board had been
on the search committee who had recommended either him or the school director
(or our former rabbi, who also hadn't worked out so well); we all spent a lot
of time looking back and trying to understand what we'd overlooked.
On the plus side, we now have a
very smart, good new rabbi and cantor-school director, and they work well
together. We're hoping for a less
dramatic (but positive) year in 2010.
Me / us My favorite moment each week is Sunday morning, reading the New York
Times on my chaise long, and looking at the trees & sky out the
window. I love watching the huge
world march by, from my safe, quiet corner.
I think Steve and I get along
easier than before: the years have
worn off a bit of abrasiveness; we have fewer ambitions and a keener sense of
mortality. We cling a little more
to each other.
Hoping the New Year is a healthy
and peaceful and prosperous one for you all.
Leon writes. There's not a lot to report this
year. I had full class loads spring and fall, and that kept me quite busy, as
it did last year. I was a teaching assistant again last spring, for the same
non-calculus mechanics class that I reported on last year. However, a different
professor was teaching, and he was much more involved than his predecessor.
This included writing quizzes, selecting problems for group work, and a number
of other tasks that greatly reduced my workload, and allowed me to do a better
job. My evaluation the first time TAing was "very good". This time it was
"excellent".
Research was
the big new thing this year. I started it last summer, and there's a good
chance I'll still be doing it in four years (average graduation time is 5.5),
so I'll use most of my letter to fill you in. In addition to research, I was
taking classes last fall, which left me little time to do other things.
However, I'm nearly done with classes now, so I hope to spend time doing more
interesting things. Hopefully you'll get to read about it next year.
The research
group I joined is run by a young professor, and the research is primarily
focused on experimental quantum computing. The idea is that computers can be
built to take advantage of the weirder aspects of quantum physics to do certain
calculations much faster than normal computers can. In particular, there is
– at least in theory – a way to factor numbers much more quickly.
This may seem like a silly thing to get excited about, but it turns out that if
you can factor large numbers quickly, then you can break the encryption most
commonly used on computers. For that reason, there's a lot of government money
being directed to the field.
However,
there's currently little to fear. A quantum computer factored 15 in to 5 and 3 in
2001, but the record hasn't improved much since. There are a number of
approaches to quantum computing, and each has something holding it back. That
method could easily scale to handle 4 bit numbers (0 to 15) but not much beyond
that.
Our approach
is based around Josephson junctions – sandwiches of two superconductors
with a thin electrical insulator in between. Although it doesn't sound like
much, it exhibits some interesting behavior which I won't describe in detail.
The result is that while the strange effects of quantum mechanics usually only
appear in extraordinarily small systems (like an atom), we can make them arise
in systems that are (barely) visible to the naked eye.
The story
behind these devices is an interesting one. Their behavior was predicted by
Brian Josephson, when he was a 22-year-old graduate student. He went on to win
a Nobel prize, and left mainstream physics shortly afterwards. He busied
himself with his "Mind-Matter Unification project," studying the
paranormal, and researching how to bend cutlery with your mind. If you have the
chance, check out an interesting interview with him in the July 1982 issue of
Omni magazine.
There are a
number of ways to use Josephson junctions in quantum computers. For example, an
electrical current can be made to flow around a small ring interrupted by two
Josephson junctions. Classical computers work by manipulating zeros and ones.
Flow in one direction (say clockwise) would be a zero, and flow in the other
direction would be a one. However, instead of being restricted to just zero or
one, a quantum computer can consider a mix of zero and one. That is a strange
situation – you can't imagine simultaneously spinning clockwise and
counterclockwise in an office chair, but that's similar to what happens. Our
devices are similar in design, but the operating principle is more complicated
(and I don't fully understand it myself).
The problem
with this approach is short coherence times – you can't keep it in the
strange moving-two-directions-at-once state for long. So little of our research
is a direct attempt to building a quantum computer. About half is understanding
the problems so that we can make one some day, and the other half is using the
tools we have to do other things.
For example,
our approach requires fast and accurate measurements of magnetic fields.
Another Josephson junction based device (called a SQUID) allows this, and there
is a medical physics student in our group working to use these in MRI machines.
Because this detector is more sensitive than those currently used, it will
hopefully no longer require the giant donut shaped magnet that's the most
expensive and least portable part of the machine (at least that's my
understanding – I'm not directly involved in the project).
All this may
sound interesting, but I spend little time thinking about the physics I've
summarized. Since I'm doing experimental – not theoretical –
physics, I spend most of my time making things in the clean room or doing
measurements and a little doing design work and computer simulations.
This lead to
my first clean room experience. There was one at Dartmouth, but I never made
use of it. "We like to think that this isn't a dirty room," is how the area I
used for research was described to me. A clean room may conjurer up images from
movies of spotless laboratories and people fully enclosed in protective suits,
but that's something else. I don't work with infectious diseases. Mostly, I
just have to keep dust off my devices. Since they're quite small, a speck of
dust could ruin them during fabrication. We do wear special suits, but they
don't include any breathing apparatus, and the only thing special about them is
the non-fibrous material they're made of. We do put on more protection when
handling toxic or caustic chemicals, but nothing like the full suits from the
movies.
Many of the
tools we use are taken from the semiconductor industry – being able to
call on its extensive knowledge is a big advantage to our quantum computing
approach. For example, Intel donated a room-sized machine called a wafer
stepper, and we use it to fabricate our devices (when it's working – it
was made in 1992 and is very fussy).
Now that the
background is out of the way, I'll mention the actual projects I've been
working on. These are likely to change since my advisor is full of ideas, but
the background will likely be the same as long as I stay with my group.
My first
project dealt with the cause of the short coherence times. Evidence suggests that
the main culprits are defects in the materials we make our devices out of. The
materials are mostly crystals, but other elements that sneak in can mess up the
structure – these are defects. I was measuring the properties of
different materials to look for ones with fewer defects, and looking for a way
to substitute one of them in to our devices. I was somewhat successful with the
first part, and another student has taken over the second part.
I'm now
working on a project to make SQUIDs optimized to be electrical amplifiers.
We're all done with design work and just started fabrication. The first batch
had some issues, but hopefully we'll get results soon.
The last
project I'm working on is a collaboration with another professor (who is partly
funding me). He works on a different approach to quantum computing, but we have
some techniques and equipment in common. I'm working to make a better
measurement circuit for his devices.
That's
research. While school has taken up most of my time, I do some other things. Of
them, you might be interested in my hobby projects. My favorite is a key fob
sized random number generator – useful for people who have trouble making
choices. That and some small software projects are linked to from my website:
https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/lnmaurer/web/
The last thing
I want to mention was my trip to the Czech Republic and Poland last summer. The
original impetus for the trip was genealogical research my Dad had done a
couple years ago (a continuation of work by his father). However, while he
couldn't fit the trip in to his schedule, his brothers and their families
could, and I traveled with them. Every family has a different travel style, but
the common influence for these families was clear, so I fit in and it was a lot
of fun.
The heart of
the trip was a several day stay in Biecz, Poland – where my ancestors who
share my last name come from. This was a particularly special visit because we
had a Biecz native and Holocaust survivor as a guide. That's a subject I've
heard much about in Hebrew and regular school, but it's a different experience
when someone can point to the basement they hid in or the place where a
neighbor was shot. However, the same force that makes the experience powerful
effectively prevents me from passing it on through writing, so I won't try even
though I feel very privileged to have experienced it.
The rest of
the trip focused on Prague and Krakow – both very nice cities, filled
with tasty treyf food – I think I ate better in those cities than any
other I have been to. The final highlight of the trip was a search for a
relative's gravestone in a mostly unmaintained cemetery in Tarnow, Poland. We
only had a pre-WWII picture to go on, and the cemetery was quite large, but we
miraculously found the gravestone intact. A link to the picture is below.