L'articolo An Advent Calendar for Developers: day 19 to 24 sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

The New Witch-Hunt

(originally published on Y / 03 /2017)

The new threat to the civil development of the Western society is not capitalism, but radical liberalism, by hand of politically correctness. I am observing a worrying trend especially on social media, by which any opinion that vaguely contradicts the self-calling liberal loud voices, provokes waves of indignation, derision, rudeness, even bullying. Healthy debate is out of trend and the new concept of "respect" does not include discussion. The game is succeeding at polemicise on anything or find two-faced meanings that allow us to fill with indignation.

This is simply the modern version of witch-hunting, with torch and pitchfork held high against who threatens the modern "mono-thinking". Spits and public humiliation, anything is allowed, including strip of humanity and identity layers any virtual stranger. Feeling strong from their ideology, some people feel authorised to scream in the face of those who disagree.

To show an example, few weeks ago the story of a (Caucasian) girl who had slowly poisoned her (Afro-American) college roommate and bragged about it on Instagram went viral. I came across it when the picture of the accused, complete with full name, went viral with the caption "Be a nasty bigot and we will make you famous for it". I found myself wondering which one was the worst example of human nature, the original story or the long series of deplorable comments and threats which followed. A woman with the same name has to temporarily suspend all her social media accounts out of the verbal abuse she had endured.

I believe our ideas never allow us to rejoice of other people's misery, nor to verbally assault or superficially judge others. From those who claim to champion for diversity, I except that they do the same with ideas. I conclude by quoting Evelyn Beatrice Hall's famous words, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".

L'articolo The New Witch-Hunt sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

L'articolo The future together sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Who changed?

(originally published on issue  Y / 06 / 17)

August will mark the start of my eight year in Finland. I left Italy to go on an Erasmus period and I never went back. With Finland, it was love at first sight. The nature, the peace, the deep honesty in people. I have grown up in a country where "honest" is synonym to "stupid", where you meet those who brag about not paying taxes and get public approval, where if you are not someone's daughter you don't get anywhere. And let's not mention sexism.

After few months in Finland, I realised no one was treating me as a woman, but simply as an individual - you may take this for granted, it's not - and my efforts were rewarded with good grades and a job offer. I observed Finns and I was fascinated by the love they felt for their country. There's an unwritten rule, by which only Finnish people can complain about Finland. I looked around and saw people of several nationalities and languages - again, not the norm everywhere - and I thought that maybe my place was really here. I called my boyfriend and told him to pack, we were going to move.

Seven years later I'm a Finnish citizen, I have two children and a new job. Over the years I've met other immigrants and heard of several small injustices, I've followed the news about the migrant crisis, and even hosted in my house a full family which was waited to be deported. In my other ear I've heard of thousands of migrants coming through Italy every day and I compare that with the ridiculous migrant quota Finland set. I remind myself of all the times not being a Finnish-speaker played against me, as a parent and as a professional. I think back to the love of Finns for Finland, and I now see a terrible insecurity as well. Was it there seven years ago? One good quality of Finnish people which impressed me at the start was how they are able to react fast and with imagination to any social issue. Today I struggle to see that aspect, or it seems very selective. And I wonder, who changed, Finland or I?

L'articolo Who changed? sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

The movie depicts the story of one of the finest minds of last century and one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Srinivasa Ramanujan. He was what you'd call a true genius, an independent thinker who could not bend to the typical mathematical formalism nor to social conventions. He was born and lived the first part of his life in (British) India, in the region of Madras. in He showed a lively interest in mathematics already at the age of 11, and by the age of 15 he was able to master advanced notions and carry on his own research, often on known results he was not aware of. Basically he was re-building mathematics from almost scratch! He won a college scholarship, but he was so focused on mathematics that he performed poorly in other subjects and lost it. He tried to enrol in another college, with same results. His thrive to study mathematics and only mathematics led him to extreme poverty and corrupted his health. At age 21, he married and got to search for a real job. He found one in accountancy, a trivial job for his abilities which left him with much spare time to continue his studies.
In 1913, Ramanujan took the initiative and started sending letters to English mathematicians, for support and advice. Among his recipients, was Godfrey Hardy, a brilliant researcher of mathematical analysis and number theory. Ramanujan had no formal education in mathematics. Most of his work relied on epiphanies he had during spiritual meditation. Many mathematicians were skeptic of his true abilities, but came around after making direct contact with him. Hardy was the opposite as the Indian mathematician: he was atheist, while Ramanujan was deeply religious; he championed formalism and pure proofs, while the other basically guessed (right) deep results and did not care about technical details. However, Hardy managed to see past his own style and became Ramanujan's best supporter. He convinced him to travel to England, where he lived the last years of his unfortunately short life. Hardy tried to educate him, without suppressing his unique style, and polished his results so that they would be easy to publish on journals. In 1918 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and became one of his youngest members. In the same year he was also appointed Fellow of the Trinity College, in Cambridge, the first Indian to be honoured with the title. One year later, his health forced him to return to India to his wife, and he died in 1920 at the age of 32 from an incurable sickness.

He left the mathematical community with an incredible treasure. Most of his results needed to be proved (or disproved) and a journal was founded to collect results inspired by his work. In 2011, India declared the day of his birth, December 22nd, as "National Mathematics Day". He also left us the taxicab numbers. His most famous conjecture, named after him, waited for 50 years to be solved by Pierre Deligne.
I am very excited about this upcoming movie, and while waiting for it, I'll make sure to read the book which inspired it.

L'articolo The man who knew infinity: a movie about Ramanujan sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Important disclaimer: this is my personal (and not professional) translation. Please keep in mind that the quoted expression were originally expressed in Italian language, so do not give too much weight to shading of meaning that I may have affected with my translation. If you have any suggestions to improve this translation, feel free to comment below or contact me.

***

By scrolling down the names of the few jurors of the Bell Labs Prize, assigned on last December 8th in the famous Murray Hill labs, New Jersey, one can find Alessandra Sala's name. The Bell Labs know well about awards: they are a legendary "knowledge factory" which hosts eight Nobel laureates and to which we owe the credit of key inventions of contemporary technology, such as the transistor or the laser.

Last year, the Bell Labs Prize winners have been heavyweights: Emmanuel Abbe (Princeton University), Patrick Reynaert (Leuven University) and Matilde Sanchez Fernandez (Università of Madrid). However, the spotlight here is on Alessandra Sala, especially for those who are used to successful Italian people: 36 years old, originally from Salerno, she is in charge of the European unit of Bell Labs in Dublin. Born in Milan but grown up in Amalfi, with a degree in computer science from University of Salerno, the scientist-manager leads 65 technologists, who are between 30 and 40 years old: a team of mainly men, who work on developing advanced software for communications and analyse real-time a huge mass of data.

Sala moved to the Irish department in 2011, called by the multi-awarded Markus Hoffmann; in 2013, she became technical manager. Her profile is the one of a senior researchers, with great experience, who lived always in the middle of academia and business: after the master and the doctoral degree, she moved to Zurigo as a visiting student at ETH (18000 people from 80 countries). Afterwards, she was hired by the University of California in Santa Barbara to work in Professor Ben Zhao's group, where she stayed for five years.

All these experiences, she claims, made her appreciate two strengths, great and undeniable, of the American system: the excellent structure of the doctoral programmes and the fruitful relationship - almost interdependence - between academia and the business world, a link based on the regular check of the practical implications of the studied subjects. With rich fundings which never stopped, not even during the economic crisis.

Her peculiar trait is her management, the way she deals with her collaborators, who define her as "tough but with a human touch". She smiles and comments: "There are two kinds of career women: the ruthless one, who mistreats her team, and the one who defends it, still leading it. Definitely I do not belong to the first kind. I try to understand the people who I work with. They feel it and do not take advantage. It takes more time, sure, but it pays off".

Surely it is crucial to understand people from different cultures when you lead a team which includes European, Indian, Chinese people. "To play the game of understanding each other", she says, "I did this wherever I worked. Maybe less in my family when I was younger, with my older sister, who graduated at Bocconi University in Economy: she was the diligent, I was the rebel".

With her technical background, she is used to work-environments with mostly men, but she claims she never "suffered any discrimination". As many other Italian people who emigrated, she is happy she moved back to Europe, to Ireland which she likes. "I wanted to make great things without being forced by economical or bureaucratic limitations which still affect our country. I am succeeding".

***

Read about the Bell Labs Prize 2015 winners here. Congratulations to Alessandra for her success and to the winners of this year!

L'articolo Alessandra Sala, scientist and manager sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

During the week I shared many images, slides, topics. I decided to collect them all, so that they do not get lost in the feed and may turn up useful for myself or someone else in the future. I will not write complete explanations, it will be more of a list of resources. Feel free to use whatever, but please be polite and quote the source (I will indicate the author or the original website for everything).

Mathematics and its applications

X-ray tomography

X-ray tomography is my area of research (see here for details about my current project). Here some resources:

• Wikipedia page on X-ray tomography
• X-ray tomography used in archeology: mummies and lost letters.
• Wikipedia pages on J. Radon and Radon transform.
• VT-cube, a device that reduces X-ray irradiation in dental imaging.
• Denoysing 4D cardiac tomography images.
• Lecture notes on tomography.
• How tomographic data is collected.
• Reference: Smith et al. 1977. "A finite set of radiographs tells nothing at all".
• Compare FBP with other reconstruction algorithms for sparse data.
• An application of dynamic CT: coronary angiography. About 10 million tests carried every year in US.
• Another research group working in dynamic CT.
• Public CT real dataset by University of Helsinki.

Other Inverse Problems

Wikipedia page on Inverse Problems.

Image enhancement and inpainting.

• Inpainting Wikipedia page.
• Image restoration: deblurring & co.
• Our group will soon start working in image enhancement.

Invisibility cloak. How Harry Potter meets mathematics: link 1, link 2.

Creating synthetic voice. I talked about this problem here. A video where my advisor explains the project. His slides: I love this talk, every time it has great success. Speech problems affect many people, 6 to 8 millions in US only.

Seismic tomography. Seismic tomography exploits seismic wave and advanced topology to infere about the inner structure of our planet.

• Wikipedia page on seismic tomography.
• Our research in seismic tomography.

Electrical Impedance Tomography. EIT is a widely used medical imaging technique, employed especially in breathing monitoring.

• Wikipedia page on EIT.
• Our group's research on EIT.

Gravitational Lensing. Wikipedia page: measuring space bodies' properties from their interaction with remote light.

Forest monitoring. The Tampere Inverse Problems group uses inverse problems techniques to monitor and model forests, contributing to fire prevention and paper industry estimations: video.

Other applications

(see also Computer Science section)

Cryptography. Internet transactions require sensible information to be properly masked. For instance, when you buy online with your credit card, data transmission is protected by cryptography techniques (ex. RSA). Here some links:

• RSA Wikipedia page.
• Prime numbers are fundamental for RSA.
• The standard protocol SSL uses RSA.

Big Data. Wikipedia page on Big Data.

Rollercoaster engineering. Rollercoaster loops are designed according to a mathematical curve called Euler spiral, to maximise the fun and minimise nausea. Euler spiral can be found also in highways, to make turning at high speed safer.

Biomathematics. A fun example of biomathematics modelling can be found in this zombie scenario paper. Biomathematics had a big role in containing the Ebola infection.

Finance. Likely the person dealing with your investments is a mathematician. Here a Wikipedia page.

Computer Science

• Mathematics in Google algorithms: article on The Guardian.
• Mathematics in animation movies.
• P=NP problem: link 1, a simple explanation, an article on New Yorker,

Women in Mathematics

• The Fields Medal was won by a woman for the first time in 2014.
• Agora, a movie about a female mathematician of antiquity, Hypatia.
• University of Nottingham playlist on women in mathematics.
• How to propose to a mathematician.
• Sofia Kovalevskaya. My post on her, Google's dedicate Doodle, a movie on her life.
• Book on Minorities in Mathematics.
• TV series: The Bletchey Circle.
• Sophie Germain, who studied with Lagrange.
• How gender stereotypes affect mathematics skills at early age.
• [not only about women] Childcare at conferences: a post on Tenure She Wrote, my vision, Geoscience conference that provides it, some family care grants: LMS - UK, Franklin Women, SMBE, AustMS.
• Representation of women in mathematics at conference: a practical guide.
• Some links on women in STEM.
• Emmy Noether, allowed to work (for free or under a male colleague's name!) in a time when women were not allowed in academic life. A video about her by Katy Mack.

Algebra and Number Theory

Goldbach's conjecture (Wikipedia page). Goldbach's conjecture is an open problem in number theory. It states that every even number greater than 2 is sum of two prime numbers. For instance: 8=5+3, 18=11+7, 22=11+11. This has been checked for huge numbers (), but to date there is no proof that it's true for all even numbers. Some links:

• Page with updates on the verification of the conjecture.
• Post on Terence Tao's blog on his progress.

Collatz's conjecture (Wikipedia page). The conjecture states: take any natural number n. If n is even, compute n/2. If n is odd, compute 3n+1. Iterate the procedure. You'll alway end up at 1.

Fermat's Last Theorem (Wikipedia page). Stated by Fermat in 1635 and proven only in 1995 by Andrew Wiles, it claims that, given any n greater than 2, there is no integer solution to the equation . For instance given a cube, you cannot split it in the sum of two other cubes. Fermat wrote on the margin of a book "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem which this margin is too small to contain.". Here Wiles recalls the moment when he understood his proof was complete (after 7 years of work). If you find the topic interesting, don't miss this great popular book by Simon Singh.

Induction. A technique to prove statements for natural numbers is induction. It works this way: (1) I want to prove statement A is true for all natural numbers, (2) I check A's true for n=1, (3) I assume A's true for a generic n and based on that, I prove A's true for n+1.

Proof of infinity of prime numbers. Euclid proved that prime numbers are infinitely many by a reduction ad absurdum proof. One assumes something, through logic gets to something absurd and concludes the initial assumption must have been false in the first place.

Perfect numbers. A perfect number is an integer that is equal to the sum of its divisors (except the number itself). An example is 6, whose divisors are 1,2,3,6, and 1+2+3=6. A cool property is that the sum of the reciprocals of perfect numbers' divisors is always equal to 2: . So far only even perfect numbers have been found and the question if odd perfect numbers exist is open.

Weird numbers. Some weird names for numbers: sexy primes, friendly numbers, amicable numbers, sociable numbers, twin primes.

Pi. Pi is one the most celebrated numbers ever, even having its own anniversary. Even Star Trek talks about it and Kate Bush wrote a song! Pi is irrational, meaning it cannot be expressed as a fraction. An equivalent formulation is that its infinitely many digits have no pattern, so in principle you can easily find any string of numbers in there. Another property of Pi is that it cannot be expressed as zero of an polynomial with rational coefficients ( is irrational but a zero of instead), making it trascendental. The most decimal places of Pi memorised is 70,000, and was achieved by Rajveer Meena in 2015.

Geometry and Topology

Art and mathematics.

[add Mobius scarf and bacon: downloaded. Add Bathsheba Grossman.]

I mentioned two weird geometry constructions (manifolds) in particular: Möbius' strip and Klein's bottle. They are non-orientable. Möbius's strip has not "over" or "below", Klein's bottle has no "inside" or "outside.

Non-euclidean geometries. Eucliden geometry, the "classical one", is based on some axioms. At some point some mathematicians wondered if they were all necessary and experimented with creating new geometry settings.

Here the Wikipedia page on the topic. Also, non-euclidean geometries relate to Einstein's General Relativity Theory.

The Seven Bridged of Königsberg. This problem was solved by Euler in 1736 and led to the birth of graph theory. Graph theory is used when solving or creating mazes. Another related famous problems is the Four Colour Theorem: given any map, you can use only four colours to fill all countries so that any two adjacent countries have different color. The latter was proved by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken in 1976. They reduced to 1'936 possible cases and then checked them all with a computer. It was the first time computing was used in a formal proof.

The happy ending problem. Below I state the problem visually. George Szekeres went even further and proved you can always draw the polygon you want, if you draw enough initial points (for a convex pentagon: you need 9 points). There is a conjecture stating you need points to be sure to find a convex polygon with sides. The question was named this way because it led to the long-lasting love of Esther and George Szekeres. They were married 70 years and died within one hour from each other. Mathematics can make you fall in love sometime...

Homeomorphisms. One of the funniest tools in topology. Here a video showing why donuts are mugs after all. Below another weird transformation: from a square to a (almost) torus.

Manifolds. Another powerful maps are diffeomorphisms, a level on top of homeomorphisms. Manifolds are geometrical objects that are locally similar to for some n. For instance a sphere is a manifold of dimension 2, small regions are comparable to planar regions. If you consider a sphere, you imagine it embedded in tridimensional space, but truth is you don't know the third dimension. All you know is your 2-dimensional "curved" life on the sphere. This is why you need new tools to define differentiation, that is usually linear and "flat". Manifolds find many real-life applications: for instance seismic tomography (see above) or robotics.

Analysis and Calculus

Harmonic series.  Their name comes from music. The basic question is: can we get infinity by summing up infinitely many infinitesimal quantities? Turns out it depends, as you can see from the figures. Relating to harmonic series is the problem of book stacking.

Integration. The theory of integration started several centuries ago, when people questioned how to calculate "difficult areas", but it was rigorously stated by Riemann in the XIX century. Below you find my explanation of his theory and a visual solution about integrability of monotone functions.

Pompeiu problem. Formulated in the past century, it's still open. Here's my favourite reference on the topic. See the problem below.

Banach-Tarski paradox. With a very formal proof, Banach and Tarski showed it is in principle possible to cut a sphere in pieces and recombine the pieces to get two spheres identical to the first. The trick is to decompose the sphere in non-measurable sets, that is something really artificial and odd.

History of Mathematics

Math duels ("disfide"). Around 1500, mathematicians used to challenge each other to math duels, to prove who was smarter and more able to solve problems. A famous series of such episodes concerned the formula to solve cubic equations, that is equations of the form . It all started with Tartaglia, an Italian mathematician nicknamed like that for his stammering. Born in a poor family, he had been a soldier, a topographer, and was a talented self-taught mathematician. At the time, mathematicians rarely published their results and only shared them with their students and maybe family, so that they would have an ace in their hole when it came to being hired by some university. At some point, a mathematician contemporary to Tartaglia, Antonio Maria del Fiore, started bragging about knowing the formula to solve cubic equations, which he learned from his teacher Scipione Del Ferro. Tartaglia was an ambitious researcher and found the formula independently. He then accepted a "math duel" from del Fiore. Tartaglia annihilated del Fiore and became immediately famous. Cardano, famous mathematician of the time, invited him to Milan. Tartaglia told him the "secret formula", under the oath he would not reveal it. However, he still hesitated to publish it. Years later, Cardano found out that Del Ferro - then long gone - had discovered the formula previously and independently, thus he felt relieved from his promise to Tartaglia. He then allowed his student Ferrari to publish their research and improvements on Tartaglia's formula. The result was a duel, in which Tartaglia lost due to his stammering and lack of confidence in public speaking. Luckily history gave him credit and the solving formula is named also after him.

Evariste Galois. One of the most brilliant mathematicians ever existed, he died very young in a duel (a real one!). Here his biography. His results were crucial to Wiles to prove Fermat Last Theorem.

The stolen theorem. One of the most popular calculus theorems is believed to have been commissioned by De L'Hopital to Johann Bernoulli.

Riemann's hypothesis. A great popular book to know more about prime numbers and a legendary problem in analytical number theory is The Music of Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy.

The Newton-Leibniz controversy. The two illustrious contemporary scientists fought to be recognised as inventor of calculus. Historians now believe they both were right and invented calculus independently, but at the time Newton's influence allowed him to win the argument and Leibniz died in disgrace. This rivalry was quoted in the popular show The Big Bang Theory.

Paul Erdos. Some say he was the greatest mathematician of the past century. He collaborated with more than 500 people, writing more than 1,525 papers, in many different areas and topics! Erdos belonged to an Hungarian Jewish family that lived during Nazism. His father died in the Holocaust and his mother survived in hiding. He didn't have a home: he kept travelling around the world, stopping at conferences or hosted by colleagues. He would knock in the middle of the night at the door of some colleague and say he was ready to solve some problem. No one would dare to turn him down and throw the chance away, 'cause his productivity and genius were out of ordinary. He received 15 honorary doctorates.

Alexander Grothendieck. I wrote about him when he passed last year. Someone translated some of his lectures in English. You can read more on his life here.

Riddles

The hanging picture problem. Hang a picture to the wall using two nails and a string. Fix the string in such a way that if one (any) of the two nails is removed, the picture falls down.

Solution: name by variables the following actions: means "to pass the string over nail 1 clockwise",   means "to pass the string over nail 1 counterclockwise". Similarly for and nail 2. We can combine actions through a sort of multiplications. Passing the string over nail 1 in one sense and then the other would be , so we understand that corresponds to "nothing is done", meaning "the picture falls down". Also, observe (physically) that the actions are not commutative: try and check that it is not equivalent to do only . Also, removing for instance nail 1 corresponds to ignore all actions as and . Hence our problem translates to: write a product so that by removing all occurrences of $x, x^{-1}$ or you get 1. Since our product is not commutative, one solution will be: . Through abstraction you can easily generalise this trick to any number of nails!

A reference link on the topology behind this.

The prisoners. Three prisoners meet a guard in a room. The guard says: "I have hats with me, two of which are black and the others are white". The prisoners ask: "How many hats there are all together?", the guard replies: "It's a secret!". The guard picks three of the hats and puts them on the prisoners' heads. All prisoners see the others' hats color, but not their own. The guard asks them, one after another: "What is the color of your hat?". The first prisoner looks around and replies: "I don't know". The second prisoner looks around and replies: "I don't know". What does the third prisoner reply and what is his hat's color?

Solution: denote B=black and W=white. Because of the replies of prisoner 1 and 2, we can rule out the combinations: W B B and B W B. We are left with the following cases: W W B, B W W, W W W, B B W, W B W. All cases except one show that the third prisoner's hat must be W. Consider the case W W B. The second prisoner hears the first's reply, so he understand he cannot see two black hats, leaving only the possibilities of him seeing two white hats or one black and one white. When his turn comes, he sees the third wearing black, so he concludes his own must be white and replies so. Since he says he doesn't know, we must rule this case out and conclude the third prisoner has white hat and says so.

Palindromes. Find the smallest 3-digit palindrome number that is divisible by 18.

Solution: our number, denote by ABA, must be divisible by 2 and 9. A number is divisible by 9 if the sum of its digits is divisible by 9, hence A+B+A=2A+B is divisible by 9. ABA must be also even, that leaves us the following possibilities:

A=2 -> 2A+B=4+B -> B must be 5

A=4 -> B=1

A=6 -> B=6

A=8 -> B=2

The smallest is 252.

The Monty Hall problem. This is a counter-intuitive problem of probability. Even Paul Erdos, considered the best mathematician of past century, did not believe the solution until he saw computer simulations! The problem asks: you are a guest of a TV programme. The presenter shows you three closed doors: behind one there's the car of your dreams, behind the other two there are goats. He lets you pick a door (say, n.1), but before opening it, he opens one of the other two (say, n.3) and shows a goat behind it. He then asks you: "Do you want to stick with your choice or change to door n.2?". What's the best strategy? The solution says the best strategy is changing your initial choice. Here some material to understand this: link 1, link 2, link 3.

True statements. How many statements are true?

At most 0 statements in this block are true.

At most 1 statement in this block is true.

At most 2 statements in this block are true.

At most 3 statements in this block are true.

Solution: only the last two statements are true. If you assume no statement is true, then the first is true, which is a contradiction. If you assume only one is true, the last three are true, again a contradiction.

The 12 ball problem. You have 12 balls, looking exactly the same, but one is an odd weight (you do not know if it's lighter or heavier). You have a scale (see figure below) and at most three chances to use it. How do you find the odd ball? Solution is in the gallery below.

Sticks. Use 6 identical sticks to build 4 identical triangles.

Solution: click here.

Miscellanea

• How to draw a perfect ellipse.
• The golden ratio to be found in architecture and nature.
• Visualising Pythagoras' theorem.
• Communication of science: SoapBoxScience.
• The Mathematics of Sudoku. 17 is the minimum number of clues to have a unique solution. The "most difficult scheme" was created by a Finn.
• Magic square. In antiquity, they were believed to hold mystical power. Euler's work on magic squares (translated to English).
• Bayesian approach to Inverse Problems: link 1, link 2.
• Gödel incompleteness theorems. Proved by a young Gödel in 1931, they threw mathematicians in panic (still do). A funny look into the topic.
• Mathematical models for traffic jams.
• Free version of the book "A Mathematician's Apology" by the great number theorist G. H. Hardy.

L'articolo Tweeting for Real Scientists: aftermath. sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

A profile article on me was published on the latest issue of Yliopisto-lehti, the university magazine. You can find it at this link; unfortunately it's in Finnish! Anyway, I was interview regarding my research, my extracurricular activities - such as Kumpula Women's Network -, my experience as an immigrant in Finland and my thoughts on gender equality in science. All things you can read here and there on my blog - and probably you got already fed up with!

The other good piece of news was that I was chosen as the next curator of the Twitter channel @realscientists. Real Scientists is an account handled by researchers and science communicators, changing the curator every week and giving a voice to scientists to communicate with the general public (and not only). I am an avid follower of the channel, so I was very honoured when I heard they wanted me to be one of their curators. By the way, if you are a researcher/scientist/science professional/etc. consider applying. I would like people to see a new face of mathematics. There is no point in trying to force its beauty on people and I would like to share that yes, it can be frustrating and damn hard, and YES, I myself hate doing long and stressful computing... but when I think of my goals, even some short-term ones, I can get myself together and face also the boring part. It's like climbing a mountain. No one likes the effort, walking, sweating... it's just a obligatory passage to reach the top and claim "I did it".

Anyhow, check out @realscientists between September 6 and 13 because I will be tweeting there for you all.

L'articolo Exciting news: profile article and tweeting for Real Scientists sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Disclaimer: the article was originally written in Italian language. I am the author of this English translation and since I am not a professional translator, please take into account that my choice of words may have altered some passages, both in writing style or intended meaning. If so, I sincerely apologise to the original author and the interviewee, and invite them to point out what to edit.

***

In the hall of the old storage building where the Polytechnic Aerospace Institute is, nearby the railway of Bovisa station, a tiny 78 year old lady greets an ex-student, now a teacher in Trento, and says: «Call me sometime, keep me updated on the satellites». Amalia Ercoli-Finzi, best known as the mother of the mission Rosetta, the spacecraft which seeks news in space, is like this: eager of anything new, used to support her ex-students around the world, and born to look forward. When she was young, she enjoyed to dismantle bicycles in order to understand how they worked («and then I struggled to build them back»), and she was disappointed as no one could explain to her how the electromechanic bell would work. Later she chose to study aerospace engineering, when girls were carefully dodging the subject, and she was the first woman to graduate in Italy: «Because that was the newest subject back then, and I love new things. Also, flying is a miracle still today, it is not a spontaneous thing.».

Amalia has always been a pioneer, even in the acrobatic way women of today cope in the working world, with daily juggling. When she married into a middle-class family, «with my husband’s sisters who did not work and could not understand why I wanted to», she soon realised she would have not given up anything, her passion nor family: «Family would have not been enough for me, I loved my kids but spending the whole day with them, with the slow pace of the women of good society, was simply not for me».

She had four boys and a girl, while working. The boys came one after another. «I changed 32 babysitters, no one could cope with four young boys. The girl was born after few years. «I used to put them on the highchairs and give a spoon of food to each, in turns. I was grating apples all the time. They would have eaten also the table legs.», Amalia recalls, with bright eyes and joyful spirit. She remembers the monumental shopping: 40 kilos of pasta, 30 kilos of rice, every time. They were well cared for, but not spoiled, there was no chance: «Because of the war, we knew what sacrifice was, what being afraid meant, not knowing what tomorrow would bring». Not even the girl – who was younger – was spoiled? «Cuddled, not spoiled. She played with dolls, as well as with Meccano. My mother-in-law claimed she would have dressed all kids in pink, because it is a color that brings light to the face, while light blue makes you pale. Let’s not isolate girls, they can become engineers or stay at home, it’s fine as long as they can choose.»

Careful with the husband: choose wisely.

How did she balance everything back when work-life balance was not even discussed? One could use the old expression “Behind every great man there’s a great woman”: for women who succeeded in balancing their passion and family, you can easily reverse the expression. First of all, choose the right husband, one could say. «My husband is a special companion, I met him during the university years and he became a successful civil engineer: it is no good when one lives under the shadow of the other. He is a wise man, with wide shoulders on which we always loaded family problems. He never changed a diaper, but he was always there to educate our children.» Another ace in the hole for the strong Amalia was a good physical constitution, a peculiar DNA that allows her to sleep few hours, five or six on average. «When the children were small I was sleeping even four per night. While I sleep I also think, make lists for the following day, without taking notes. I count on my memory.» Still today she can remember 200 phone numbers by heart: «Brain is like a muscle, you have to exercise it».

The Rosetta Mission, what a feeling: when my drill woke up, I cried.

The "little drill" is a sixth child for Amalia. Properly speaking, it is a highly sophisticated drilling tool, scientifically named SD2, an Italian jem with diamond tip, platinum cells and zaphir lenses. However, to Amalia it is just her “little drill”, one of the instruments Italy employs to take part to the European project that investigates the material composition of the comet. Amelia cried when her tool woke up, after a 2 year and a half long sleep during which it kept Italy and the world breathless. «Everyone was impatiently waiting. After two years and a half we woke up. », she says “we”, like she was up there too, hibernated and then activated as the instruments were. Amalia is very proud of this and of the fact that Milan Polytechnic Institute has a piece of itself on a comet 450 million kilometers away. Even to get to the stars you need a lot of maths, but the beautiful and creative kind. «Mathematics is the tool that allows us to realize what we dream of» and who can celebrate it better than her, who once at school, with great spontaneity, corrected the solution of an equation of a professor, and she was right. «It was simply different from his, that’s all. »: like this, with modesty. With the same modesty she recalls that, it is true, maybe that year she had the top high-school graduation grade in Italy and in elementary school she was the quickest at computing. However, to make big scientific projects work, you need great organization and teamwork skills. «What is a woman at home? She’s the CEO of the family, with care and sharing skills, plus a company is like a successful family. This is why women are appreciated nowadays. We are kinder, less aggressive and play to the rules. We do not follow the war culture, but the one of life and future. Even in the workplace we do not want to have it all and now. All qualities that are considered good today. Our emotional intelligence allows us to understand the complex and multicultural society, to give individual attention to everyone, to discover everyone’s individual potential and help them.» Everyone has their own excellence, you just need to find out. Also, to Amalia it is important to teach girls they can succeed: «Not to be better than men, but for themselves, even though they have to fight because our society is not ready yet. However, some role models prove there is a chance, like Samantha (Cristoforetti)»

Featured image: scienzoom.wordpress.com

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Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work

The main instructor was an acclaimed photographer, Felice Frankel, who works closely with MIT scientists and creates pictures to explain or promote their research. Felice's works made it to several covers of Nature, Scientific American and Science.

I started it as an absolute beginner, I mean it. Even though I own a modest SLR camera, I never went over the full automatic pilot with it. Despite such, I could follow all the lessons and I am quite satisfied with my results and proud of my progress. For sure I can give credit to Felice and the teaching staff that I was taught not only concepts, but a frame of mind. Felice constantly invited us to take the freedom to experiment. She never imposed her aesthetic canons on us, but she showed her way of self-assessing her work and examples of parameters that could be varied.

I strongly recommend to my fellow scientists to take the time to follow this course. I will now take the chance to share some of the things I have learned.

The power of flatbed scanners

Using a flatbed scanner to take high-resolution pictures of small 3D objects was lesson one and it was a pleasant surprise. Since I could not get a hold of a proper flatbed scanner, I had to work with a multipurpose scanner/printer. However, I think the quality of the results gives a hint of what amazing things one could do with a proper high-resolution scanner!

I chose some Danish candies, which had reflections and several colours, both features I wanted to experiment with. I simply composed them on the glass and I applied different backgrounds on the top of the scanner with tape. In the scanner menu, I selected the highest resolution (600 dpi) and I saved in TIF format on my usb stick.

Here you can see a gallery of my results and some other examples.

When using a flatbed scanner, try testing with the top open, or changing the composition (rotating, moving, ...).

Smartphone pictures and videos are simply not enough

Given my laziness and my clumsiness with a camera, I often took pictures of the imaging process in the lab simply with my smartphone. I then used such pictures in my talks or meetings. Now I don't think I can go back to that.

During the course we explored two parameters of the camera and the set: depth of field and basics of lighting. In my own word, depth of field is which level of detail we allow the camera to capture, in depth. To do so, you can set different values of aperture in your camera.

As an example, you can see my own work in the following gallery. The model is a 3D printed object.

A smartphone camera definitely does not have such control. In addition, I used a tripod, thus allowing to keep always the same point of view and a stable view.

Lighting was also an interesting example. Given the unconventional summer and little equipment, I did not have much flexibility, yet still I could observe meaningful differences when using different lighting. For example, you can spot a great difference in the following two pictures.

The direct light gives a fully different taste to the object, doesn't it?

Don't give in after one attempt

Presenting your work needs preparation. I will, in the future, put the same care I put in my talks in making the pictures I need. Felice showed many case studies at the end of the course and even someone with a professional eye and tons of experience like her needs to be imaginative and try, try, and try again. You may change the background, the composition of the subject(s), the point of view, the lighting, the camera settings... There are infinitely many possibilities. And then there is post-processing, on which I am still a total zero - even though I plan to change that.

Making good pictures can take your work up to a new level. Imagine having professional looking pics in a funding application, a paper, a conference presentation. They may even win the cover of science magazines or columns. Having nice pictures can mean more clarity or more exposure. In addition, as I learned myself recently, taking a picture of something technical or scientific forces you to reconsider the subject on a brand new light. What are its fundamental parts? What's the beauty of it? Who are you addressing this picture to and what elements are important to stress for the selected audience? I find it extremely fascinating that these considerations may add an original point of view to our scientists' eyes.

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