Printer Desire Give-In, Fitting In, and the Nobel Surprise

In my last post, I mentioned about suppressing my desires to buy my personal stuff to conserve savings for unexpected expenses. This includes getting a new printer for my (teaching) job, hoping that my old printer momentarily shows signs of life (unfortunately, it did not) and at worst, I will have to send my printing jobs to a nearby shop (note: even the nearby stationery shop showed signs of closing down as sales plummet after the pandemic). By Sunday, I had this thought of giving in to the desire of buying a new printer (I don't know why). Thus, I've ordered a new multi-function printer online (usually cheaper than buying a new one from a local store). The only thing is that I won't get the printer there and then. To my surprise and delight, the new printer arrived in late afternoon yesterday. I did not do immediately the unboxing as I was too tired after coming back from work.

Later in the night, my youngest son help me do the unboxing and do the installation of the new printer. Initially, we could not get the printer to communicate with the laptop despite several attempts on the printer configuration. Luckily, I thought that it might not be the problem of the printer but possibly due to my laptop. Indeed, it only worked after rebooting the laptop.

So, I will now bid farewell to my old printer (due to be 'thrown' on Saturday when the local city council comes to collect recyclable goods).

Incidentally, sometime yesterday, I was told to print quiz questions to bring to my Monday class, which has 72 students. So, the new printer arrived at the right time for me to do this. On my current teaching job, I have gotten used to the system a bit more, doing more messaging through Microsoft Teams including booking venues for my replacement classes. On this, I must say doing replacement classes is a bit of a challenge given the large size of my classes. My smallest class has 72 students (the other two classes have 91 students and 111 students). Due to my past experience with not so good student evaluation in the past, I became more sensitive with students' grievances. So last Monday, when students were divided about my extension of the 3-hour class to four hours (since there is no class after my class), I took it seriously. I suggest to the students again to participate in the forum created in Moodle to find more suitable times for them (I saw one of them has responded and will no longer push for a 4-hour class). I must say, it will be almost impossible to satisfy every student's request given such a large number and hope that they understand this.

After my class yesterday (Tuesday), I met Dr. Foong See Kit who continued to teach part-time in Physics Department. I told him that I have crossed over to Maths Department after its HoD contacted me sometime before the semester starts. We also talked about roles of a part-time instructor in comparison to a full-time staff and shared some thoughts. The main thing is that we are there to facilitate with the teaching needed there and much of this stemmed from our desires to stay active and our love for teaching (of course, the money helps). In any case, I hope I can fit in better this time round and will go through the current semester successfully.

Trying to fit in is somewhat a story of my life, being a mathematical physicist of some sort. While in Physics Department, I had some trouble fitting in; while in Institute for Mathematical Research, found myself like an outsider as well (probably just my feelings then). There is a cliche saying of "To a physicist, I am a mathematician; to a mathematician, a physicist" (see this post). Perhaps a healthier (more positive) outlook is to say "With physicists, I would like to think like a physicist. With mathematicians, I would like to think like a mathematician." This saying is attributed to Sir Michael Berry but I could not find where precisely he said this (I remembered reading it). Searched the internet and found this interesting interview instead; putting it here for my reference. While in this topic of what fits what, yesterday, was the announcement of 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. It went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for the work on neural networks. It was certainly a surprise for me but some say that they lay the foundations of artificial intellige.nce, the current rave today. I know the name Hopfield through the Hopfield model in neural networks but was unaware of the name Hinton. I remembered borrowing books from my late eldest brother on theory of neural networks and neurocomputing; sadly I was not able to salvage them. Given the announcement yesterday, it spurred a lot of discussion about whether it should have been an award for physics or not. The Nobel Laureate Giorgio Parisi had this to say in a comment to Sabine's post:

"I think that the Nobel prize in physics should continue to spread into more regions of physics knowledge: physics is becoming wider and wider and it contains many areas of knowledge that did not exist in the past or were not part of physics. In the nutshell, physics is that part of science that depends essentially on mathematics and it is in a huge expansion both for conceptual reasons and for the incredible power of modern computers."

For me, in some ways, labels have become less important to me as I have a very wide interest in many subjects (though AI particularly NN, has yet to become one apart from Nature Language, which I have substantial interest) and whatever differences are there with respect to these labels do not form an interesting topic for me. I will certainly not say (at least in public) that the award should not be for physics (I'm very sure that the committee has thought a lot and debated on this). In any case, Howard Wiseman had this to say (paraphrasing), 'Now we know how chemists feel when physicists won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry'.

String theorist Ooguri in someone else's post, pointed to this article by Hopfield showing how much a physicist he is (doing solid state theory), before venturing out in biological physics and later to neural networks. Of course, some would still argue whether the results that he was cited for the Nobel Prize can be categorized as physics. For me, it is perhaps the physics-oriented thinking that one should look at. I still remember when we (Dr. Chan and me) started complex networks research in Institute for Mathematical Research  and published some local papers, Dr. Chan was uncomfortable with the question of whether the area (with applications to social systems) is really physics, I replied that part of complex networks fundamental work are being looked through the lens of statistical physics and hence should not worry too much. Much later, in a different setting, I quipped, if there is a 'Fizik Tulen', then the rest must be 'Fizik Tiruan'. This is meant to be a joke. Much of recent years, I have become more and more interested in condensed matter theories when topological and geometrical techniques find their way into condensed matter in a rather non-obvious way and in fact realizing abstract features normally found in more fundamental physics. Thus, I appreciate the evolution of Hopfield's research morphing from one area to another.

By the way, despite the Nobel Prize announcement yesterday, I have resisted the temptation to post anything on my FB. Perhaps (much) later, I will break this hiatus with some silly cat posting.