June 08, 2004
Eric Heller's Beautiful Art
The image is a four dimensional torus, projected onto two dimensions.
The colors emphasize the cusps and caustics associated with the projection.
This image is taken from Eric J Heller's website which is filled with lovely images, inspired by familiar topics like the one above, but also other current research, such as quantum chaos.
Eric Heller is on the Physics faculty at Harvard. Much of the website is geared
towards making the casual found objects of physicists (and mathematicians) into beautiful images.
June 06, 2004
PhDs at Google
An amusing sunday read on the role of the PhD in industry, especially at
Google and Microsoft.
In the middle is a nice summary of a difference between the Masters and the PhD, relevant to those majors considering these two degrees.
Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor at Stanford, says: "Good Ph.D. students are extreme in their creativity and self-motivation. Master's students are equally smart but do not have the same drive to create something new." The master's takes you where others have been; the doctorate, where no one has gone before.
Free login required to read the full article. Use the login in "gtmath" and the pass "Atlanta."