the abstract and the concrete
I love my job. I get to do research, and I get to teach. More to the point, I get to research like I want to, and teach like I want to.
Most people seem to believe mathematicians are basically accountants, only more prone to mental illness. Only physicists know the horrible truth: we are hippie artistes. We make it all up! We may as well be unicorn anatomists. It is only because the things that we imagine happen to be extremely practical (not on purpose, I assure you) that we get lumped in with the scientists and engineers.
The part of the unicorn I study is called combinatorics, which is a fancy math word for “counting stuff.” My research deals with combinatorics in the design of algorithms for massively parallel computation, and in informatics. Personally I am the most interested in bioinformatics, agroinformatics, and combinatorial materials science informatics, but the algorithms in my research aren’t that picky.
Now, my work is very interesting (if you are my kind of nerd), and it is also important: the Russian scientists who created MyBO4 used bioinformatics techniques to point them in the right direction.
However, look at the abstraction here: I worked on algorithms involved in the computation of the probability of a particular gene sequence found in the genotype of a virus being meaningfully related to the virus which can attack a bacterium affecting human beings.
That’s a good seven verbs away from “helping someone”. It’s satisfying to the intellectual Me to know that my intellectual work is doing good; the philosophical Me identifies as OSS, which involves me (if peripherally) in distributing technology and knowledge to those in need; but the biological, neurochemical Me has not been doing much to distinguish himself. I took up biking and (mostly) vegetarianism and declared myself a Portlander, absolved from further responsibility in my body because, gosh, I was doing SOMEthing.
Then again, the reason I haven’t studied community organizing and comparative economics and polyface farming is because I was spending all my time learning mathematics, dammit! You know, curing ReDS? Jeez, what have I done for you lately…
