I know that part. I meant extending the metaphor to the joke about printing t-shirts. David mentioned collapsing this, and I mentioned how I brought up the joke on LtU about doing this for computer science. I've read your Maxwell's Equations for Computer Science before, such as the NSF 2007 report, but never read the t-shirt joke before the talk I linked below. I first heard this joke from Todd Satogata, who wants to keep "Maxwell's Equations" as simple as a cool t-shirt, but increase its expressive power by unifying the strong and weak forces -- it just shows even physicists don't give up shrinking the size of the core theory that defines their field.
Have a good weekend! Z-Bo On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:24 PM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote: > The metaphor happened to me in grad school in the 60s when I finally took > the trouble to trace McCarthy's Lisp in itself and realized just how > powerful and comprehensive he had made it in such a compact way. It was not > so much the Turing aspect but the "slope" of the power "from nothing". I > said to myself "this is the Maxwell's Equations of computing". I think I > recounted this in the "Early History of Smalltalk". > > And as a science and math major as an undergraduate, I knew the story that > David told about how Heaviside had collapsed the difficult to understand > partial differential equations form into the vectorized-operatorized t-shirt > size we know. As a post-doc I had some fun working in McCarthy's lab at > Stanford and a hobby was finding much more compact ways to do Lisp (it can > really be shrunk down from John's version) .... and amounts really to being > able to say what it means to send a message from one context to another .... > > Cheers, > > Alan > > ------------------------------ > *From:* John Zabroski <johnzabro...@gmail.com> > > *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org> > *Sent:* Fri, July 9, 2010 2:48:27 PM > *Subject:* Re: [fonc] goals > > Just wondering... when did that metaphor get started at VPRI? The first > time I had heart you reference the t-shirt metaphor was October 2009 [1]. I > remember joking about it on Lambda the Ultimate in April of 2009 [2], and my > joke was actually based on a presentation given by the head operations > physicist of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider project at BNL, Todd > Satogata [3]. He gave a talk about how you can buy a t-shirt with Maxwell's > Equations on it and it pretty much describes the whole universe. But he > said his goal was to unify the strong force and weak force and come up with > a new t-shirt, and make millions of dollars and become famous. When I heard > that you were interested in Maxwell's Equations for Computer Science, I > immediately made the connection to Todd Satogata's BNL speech (I've heard > him give roughly the same pitch in other speeches many times), so that is > why I made the joke about printing Maxwell's Equations for Computer Science > on a t-shirt. > > [1] http://media.cs.uiuc.edu/seminars/StateFarm-Kay-2009-10-22a.asx > [2] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3265#comment-48129 > [3] http://toddsatogata.net/ > > On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote: > >> One of my all time favorite metaphors and examples for part of what we are >> trying to do in this "T-shirt programming" project. >> >> Cheers, >> >> Alan >> >> ------------------------------ >> *From:* David Leibs <david.le...@oracle.com> >> >> *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org> >> *Sent:* Fri, July 9, 2010 10:33:04 AM >> *Subject:* Re: [fonc] goals >> >> >> >> >> >> for example, is a lot of this added code because: >> the programmer has little idea what he was doing, and so just wildly >> copy-pasted everywhere and made a big mess?... >> has lots of code which is actually beneficial, such as doing error >> checking and building abstractions. >> >> similarly, is a piece of code smaller because: >> the programmer is good at getting work done in less code? >> or because the code is essentially a tangled mess of hacks? >> >> >> >> It isn't that the programmer has little idea of what he is doing. Things >> just take time to be transformed into an optimal form. >> There is a good example from the history from math, and physics that >> illustrates the point. Maxwells equations originally applied to a set of >> eight equations published by Maxwell in 1865. After that the number of >> equations escalated to twenty equations in twenty unknowns as people >> struggled with the implications. Maxwell wrestled with recasting the >> equations in quaternion form. Time passed. It was all very ugly. Finally >> In 1884 Oliver Heaviside recast Maxwell's math from the then cumbersome form >> to its modern v <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_%28geometric%29>ector >> calculus >> notation, thereby reducing the twenty equations in twenty unknowns down to >> the four differential equations in two unknowns that we all love and call >> "Maxwells equations". Heaviside invented the modern notation giving us the >> tools to make sense of something very profound and useful. Good work on >> hard things takes time plus a lot of good people that care. >> >> cheers, >> -David Leibs >> >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> fonc mailing list >> fonc@vpri.org >> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >> >> > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > >
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
