Each individual’s professional path from past to present is defined by an oft-unexpected and uncertain trajectory. As the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard once remarked, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." For some, the path is clear and straightforward – a simple gradient ascent, or more sadly, descent. Alas, life, like most multivariate functions, is rarely globally convex. Rather, it is filled with a seemingly random distribution of local minima, each of which can become an unwitting trap, and time rarely permits an exhaustive and deterministic global optimization. Instead, one must be satisfied with limited stochastic optimization. As best, life is a bounded simulated annealing, making each decision potentially transformative. (See One Life to Live.)
Canto One: Geek in a Small Town
Why might I ramble inanely about the dubious duality of life and optimization theory? Perhaps because my life path and its objective function were changed by a single experience. As Peter Medawar wrote in his delightful book, Advice to a Young Scientist, “I cannot distinctly remember a time when I did not think that a scientist was the most exciting possible thing to be.” From an early age, I too felt that calling – my childhood dream was to be a scientist, and by my teenage years, more specifically, to be a physicist.
In my naiveté, I knew mathematics was the language of physics, but my small high school’s mathematics curriculum ended with plane geometry. Haltingly, with borrowed library books, I began teaching myself trigonometry and elementary differential calculus. (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind.) By backing one of my high school classmates into the water fountain while expounding excitedly about limits, derivatives, and the slopes of tangent lines, I finally and irretrievably branded myself the left-handed, myopic geek I truly was, a seemingly singleton set in a small town.
Canto Two: Finding Others
Just after this, I was thrilled to spend a summer at the University of Arkansas in a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) program. As a term of art, STEM gained currency much later; I simply basked in the opportunity to do something amazing – stretch my talent and expand my limited knowledge with a group of likeminded physics students.
Ensconced in Fayetteville, I repeated the double slit experiment, which left me pondering wave-particle duality and the uncertain nature of reality. More importantly, in that small academic community nestled in the Ozark mountains, I met people who shared an academic passion to know and to discover. For the first time, I did not feel alone, and for that, I will be forever grateful.
During that summer, I also received a brief introduction to digital logic and a crash course in FORTRAN IV. Less powerful than today’s smartphones, computers were then multimillion-dollar behemoths, housed in secure facilities, their use limited to a select few. Now instructed in obscure, digital incantations, I was now privileged to offer subservience to the great machine. In the 1970s, this was heady stuff for a young boy from the backwoods.
Somewhat coincidentally, I was soon to read The Machine Stops, E. M. Forster’s chilling meditation on technological dependence, However. I was in no way sufficiently prescient to imagine our future dependence on these computing machines. Excuse me; Alexa, set the temperature to 68 degrees. Siri, where is the nearest grocery store? Cortana, just who was E. M. Forster? However, I digress, distracted by our digital surroundings.
Canto Three: Computing Life
At the time, the University of Arkansas had an IBM 360/50 system, and spira mirabilis, a Calcomp pen plotter that could generate graphs of computational outputs. Therein lies the second part of my transformative life experience. Armed with rudimentary FORTRAN knowledge and a paperback copy of Waterloo’s WATFIV manual, I hastened to an IBM 029 cardpunch to write my first program. Of course, it did not initially work as expected, which then introduced me to the fine art of debugging, further honed when I foolishly attempted to write a chess program.
With ambition that exceeded my skills, that first program brought my simple mathematics to life in a wondrous way. It also forced me to think more deeply, as I built a mental model of its bifurcating execution paths. (See On Cognitive Loading and Intellectual Hierophany.) I was rewarded when the static equations on my textbook pages took life; they danced and moved, revealing their secrets in rows of printed numbers and simple line plots. Deus ex machina!
Later, I learned of universal Turing machines, computability theory, and the Entscheidungsproblem, but with that first program, I knew immediately and instinctively that well-written code had an ethereal elegance and a haunting subtlety, and that breathtaking complexity – and beguiling beauty – could emerge from its simple rules and mathematical incantations. (Is there a computer scientist anywhere who has not been enthralled by Conway’s Game of Life and its cellular automata, fully Turing complete?)
Without doubt, I had found the calling of a lifetime, all that and more in a feeling for the code – the transfiguration of hypotheticals, the reification of concepts, and the instantiation of the imagination – code as both science and art.
Since then, I have marveled at intellectual haiku, brief code sketches that amused and illuminated. I have shuddered at abominable monstrosities, code assembled and then brutally modified by teams over decades, intellectual Frankensteins unleashed to sow destruction. I have seen masterpieces of minimalist, yet surpassing beauty, where form inexorably illuminated function, crafted by artists of the first order. It is all there in the code.
Throughout, I have been privileged to collaborate with scientists across diverse disciplines, from astronomy and quantum physics though genetics and gene expression to weather analysis and severe storms, all via the universal intellectual amplifier that is computing. (See Intellectual Amplification via Computing.) Each time there is excitement; there is wonder; there is discovery; there is insight, as ideas come to life.
A thing of transfixing beauty, the code pirouettes gracefully, dancing in my mind, conjuring the possible; it always will.
Finally, about that geek thing? I have always been at peace with it. Professional optimization complete; global maximum found.
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