old friends, mathematical needs.

in high school i had this friend who was (and remains) a leftist. he loved political science and history, and his goal was to become a labor union organizer.

so he went off to university and enrolled specifically into a school of industrial labor and relations. when it came time to graduate, the labor unions found him too bookish and lacking in experience.

what irony:
according to these unions, i may have more "experience" than him,
though he would be worth a dozen of me, in effort and heart.

however, today i'm writing about him and not me.
perhaps i'll tell what stories i know, another day.

---

i say that he is bookish, because he likes books and loves knowledge,
he became a student of library science, and following the trend,
he has learned about information science.

he has become a techie.
he now knows how to write code;
i think he can out-code me, most days of the week.

he has a few weaknesses, though:
he likes math but doesn't believe he can do much of it.
odd, then, that he asks me about my work, wants to understand it,
and does .. to some heuristic extent.

---

in this story, here is where i come in:
you see, he asked me to look through a few papers for him,
about some applied mathematics and algo.

earlier today i browsed through a paper by dre2ner from 1985, about an optimization problem in the plane. mostly it's linear algebra stuff, and i think it was written for people who need maths but have specialised in other things.

the next paper is by m@rc0u1ides and dre2ner, about compressing space -- collections of N dimensional points -- into a planar representation. i suspect this will be similar, except error terms now become important, but i'm curious if there's any interesting geometry.

---

strange, when i think about it:

ten years ago, my friend and i would have talked about the communist revolution and whether it made any sense at all. we would have talked about voltaire -- rather, he would talk and i would listen and nod -- and perhaps we'd talk about ancient philosophies.

i think that when we talk next, it will be about symmetric, positive semi-definite matrices, norms and homogeneity, and the geometry of linear algebra.