Know and extend your limits!

Anyone who walks in to the realm of calculus, would stop by and admire the beauty in limits.  Its where I discovered infinity and  infinitesimal. This post is about the limits we have in life and the possibility of extending it.

We are limited in our abilities, we have only 24 hours and five senses and plenty of wishes and thoughts to do. Human brain is a sequential machine, where you cannot even think of thinking two thoughts at once, but cannot think it in actual.  Your thoughts are precious and how often we waste that limited resource by thinking about something detrimental. If you count on the hours that you actually make it count in your own ways, how much is it out of 24?

Well my score was pathetically low, but for today it is very close to 24(extrapolating 20 to 24!). Let me record this beautiful day of mine which showed me how to extend the limits. Almost 24 hours ago a friend of mine woke me up from a slumber and shared lot of good things along with a story!I passed on that story and got lot more stories from people around.

If you are reading this and if you have been part of this day, you would know your part in this day! So I am not going to elaborate on those. Briefly I got to know that one of my friends was going places!, spoke with another who took a leadership challenge and we did a post-mortem analysis, connected with my mentor who in a way pushed my adrenalin, the ever greeky partial differential equation book was a page turner,met some interesting people in the campus whom I didnt cross paths in last 9 months, reconnected with a old friend from a distant land. The best of all was the video about “Joy” which I got from my senior friend.  Surprisingly a friend willingly volunteered for my evening walks which I usually do alone.When such people fill in my limited thought process, negative thoughts run out of space and just wait around in the corner.

You might think that I was always on phone/chat/cafe to be able to entertain these many people. But it was one of the most productive days. I filled up notebooks and wrote more code almost thrice of what I do in  a normal day. Just because my limits were extended. When I was almost ready to sleep,I stumbled on google science fair video and the recording of final event.

Google runs a global competition where students between 13-18 submit their ideas to change the world. The final 15 were taken to googleplex – the disney land of geeks and celebrated along with their inventions. It was a celebration of science and childhood! Two things which I strongly believe in, if one wants to have a better world, the way to it is to grow better kids. These kids were simply beyond their ages and the chief guests insisted on the importance of science and made it even more attractive. Unfortunately we have made it difficult to live inspite of the technology. One car is good but one million car results in traffic jam. They illustrated such points and emphasized the importance of using knowledge as a weapon which is the only way to help the world. Instead of saying “Conquer the world” it was a plea “to help the world”.

That made me unable to sleep for the night and continued on the hacking! Not just because I wanted to just  complete the project,but I felt I am capable and responsible to serve the world. When I don’t like a thing in the world, I think about it, and my helplessness about it and regret a lot. It was a limiting factor. Some how these kids and those wonderful people made me feel that when you become capable and responsible , you can change the thing you don’t want to think about. That is the way of knowing your limits and extending it.

Surround yourself with good people and hence good thoughts, feel the responsibility and the rest is going to follow….

Book: Killing time – Paul Feyerabend

Some times you strike gold at a random pick. After a heavy read I was looking for a lighter book(in terms of weight) and did spend about 15 minutes walking across the library to pick this. This title “Killing time” caught my attention, because its pretty much what we do in life. Its not a time management book but was surprised at the later part of the title which said “The autobiography of Paul Feyerabend”. Why would some one title their life in such a way! I didnt even bother who the guy was and what was he into, I checked out the book.

A little bit of googling increased my curiosity for he was some professor in various universities with uncanny behaviour. He has put up this recollection of his life in his death bed  and he didnt live to see to the book being published. Words from the people in deathbed, teaches you a lot about how to live your life.(Ex:Last lecture!)The book starts from his childhood (age 3) and travels chronologically. He starts by saying that he doesnt have a habit of keeping stuff and hence most of these thoughts are from memory.

Childhood: Born in Austria, he had strict parents who were also bit weird. The first few pages might be very difficult to digest !He was kept inside the home for most of his childhood and he was late to school.He also describes about the various books he read as a kid !”Between three and six I spent most of my time between kitchen and bedroom”.In school he excelled and his expertise outweighed that of his teachers.  Physics and maths seemed to be a natural instinct for him.We learn about his views on good and bad teachers. But when the world is in war, irrespective of your nature, you will be forced to involve in it.

Fighting for Hitler: “He was the only face among faceless men.” – We get to hear about Hitler occupied Austria and Hitler’s charm. Paul was some one who has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and he would do anything to keep him in that pursuit.

“Because I want to  read without being disturbed” – that was the reason for all things during war.  He ends up being crippled in war and he desires to remain so, for its a more comfortable state for his pursuit rather than being a healthy man in the battle ground.

“One must learn to renounce simple pleasure and war is the greatest teacher“

Post war: Post war, after his own share of struggles he gets to the university to learn. We see him as a science student who is against philosophical discourses. Things take an interesting turn and we get to see how his thoughts evolve. He describes that his work was “unfinished ,tentative, without any overall purpose”.

“In a way I was waiting for my life to begin! -tomorrow, I thought , or next week or next year everything would fall in place. Meaning is something which doesnt guide your actions, but arises in the course of it.”

He keeps on going and suddenly we find these lines “My activities,interests , the things I wrote and attended begin to merge“. And from there events take  a different course and he is a established young man for the world. He could earn and do what he loves to do, but finds out that he couldnt make love as other animals do. But that doesnt deter him from having girl friends. We see many women of various shades come in and go out of his life.

From here we get to hear his views on academia and his work in the colleges in London, Bristol, Berkely,Yale and finally Zurich. In his later stages he could get tenure from any college he wished in the world.Starting from the sciences he gets to the philosophy of science and his work “Against method” breaks his life in ways beyond you could think of. There are lessons to be learnt here on how to treat yourself  different from your work.We get to learn highly evolved views on philosophy of science.

He as a loner all his life and enjoyed being so,placing high regards for intellectual pursuit. Towards the end of the life we see him as a sentimentalist and his love for the last woman in his life Gracia moves him  to a different perspective. He values love and years to live to just be around her. They even talk about having kids!

And the book ends with those lines

“That is what I would like to happen, not intellectual survival but the survival of love!“-

That is an hard rocky mountain which was moved. I would rate this book and life as one of the best I have come across. Inspite of a busy week, I kept clinging to this book in piecemeals and it was the fuel which drove me.  Even made me “Too excited to sleep” quoting in his style.  If you had liked what you have read, then find some ways to “Killing time”.

Dreams can come true when you chase them!

A year back I was just out of my job with a desire to master the basics of computer science and little maths. Some where deep in the heart I had this desire of working on brain science , through the gates of computer science.  You cant raise your standards in 2-3 months until you have sound basics.I had about 2-3 months to prepare for some of the best schools in the country.Even before I gave the exams I knew its hardly going to work and the fact that they had brain modelling as an elective made me apply for “Applied Mathematics” too in South asian university along with my preferred course Computer science.It was just a safe choice to do , when all other things didnt go my way that moment.

I wasnt good enough for the institutes I preferred and South Asian University being a new university, didnt have much competition and that was the primary reason why I got admits in both the courses Msc CS and Msc App Maths. Though I had some apprehensions , the idea of working with  one of the profs here sounded strong enough for me to not mind the Msc tag associated with the course. I was scared of Maths and felt lot of it in App Maths was unnecessary for CS and hence took Msc CS. To my shock, the prof whom I wanted to work with left the university the day I joined the place. I was determined and thought of staying here for two years and master the basics on my own which was my agenda. But the first few classes didnt work for me.It wasnt for my inquisitive brain which already had an engineering degree with 6 years of work ex. It was too primitive and going ahead would be colossal waste of time. I have tried for something which I wasnt capable of  and the audacious move backfired.Yet another failure and I was depressed and was planning a plan B. I had an admit in App Maths course too and thought of sitting through that class for few days before  discontinuing South Asian university !

We were the first batch in Maths and the faculties were just joining , so I adjusted my expectations to a lower scale. Further I didnt even know what the subjects “Analysis” and “Algebra” meant. I wrote “Numerical analysis” on the cover of the note book meant for “Real and complex Analysis” and when one of my friends corrected me, I stood stubborn arguing that “Real and complex numbers” are nothing but “Numbers” and hence Numerical analysis. That was the extent to which I knew Mathematics. I just wanted to excel in Probability and Statistics while wading through the other subjects. We had a great teacher for Analysis , through his wonderful expository teaching.,I started to get a feel of mathematics especially open sets and closed sets gave me the intuitive feel for limits,convergence and infinity.The philosopher in me had great food, but still I felt why should I read stuff on continuous domain like differential equations and was doing them as good as I did several courses in engineering.

By the end of first semester though I liked Maths, I was still sure that I am a CS guy who knew little more maths. Neuroscience was out of my reach and almost removed from my dreams for I knew I wasnt the one who could do strong theory. Second semester had an interesting array of subjects except partial differential equations in my naive view. Yes PDE was boring at class, but when I looked at the way it related with some physical concepts, I got hooked to it. But I kept my wanderings to a minimum and still wanted to focus on Statistical methods primarily. But by now I was beginning to fall for maths.I wanted to select an area where I could see the theory in action and hence went on with Image analysis.Met a prof here and through her got to know Digital image processing. It was almost a linear algebra text with some extra foot notes added. That how the book on image processing looked to me. Life has suddenly became very interesting!

This was the time when our department had a symposium planned on Mathematical modelling. I was thinking that I am rarely going to excel in Maths and didnt have much fuss about it. But the first talk was on “Stochastic Modelling on neurons”. I was trying to get an intro in to the topic and was reading a paper related to presentation. I was shocked, surprised and stumped to see that I was able to understand a theoretical neuroscience paper, it was just signal processing meets electronics meets maths meets CS. Even in terms of Maths, the abstraction I gained in other domains like probability  and analysis helped me understand this paper without even the necessity of giving a second glance.I was moved to  a state beyond description at that moment. Why should I have not even tried reading it before? Anyways I stopped reading and tried to start sleeping for it was already late and I would sleep through the morning if I didnt sleep by 2 AM then. But I couldnt get sleep! After trying hard  , I was able to sleep over my curiosity for just 2 hrs.

Woke up early and went through the essential basics and then it happened. I was able to follow Prof. Karmeshu’s keynote address on Neuroscience to an extent because of my readings. A dangerous feeling of “Its possible” stemmed inside my brain!And the lectures that followed were equally interesting, some of the best brains in the business of applied maths were here to entertain us. Not often in life you hear people say when I was in “MIT,stanford and oxford” and narrate wonderful tales for you. That three words and many more happened in the last two days. Their enthusiasm for their respective subjects was contagious and I was like a kid in candy shop wanting to take home everything from wave theory/particle physics to disease modelling. But I was  shown that differential equations are the center of mathematical modelling. I have been illustrated the beauty of this language called “Mathematics” through which we can understand the world. All those words about Maths from people who have seen it that way made sense and I am beginning to see it in a way they would have seen it. And as a coincidence and after effect we are having some interesting conversations within the campus with friend around. All of a sudden life in South Asian university has become too interesting!

I have decided to chase neuroscience with whatever efforts I can put in the coming year! Few months back I was glad that I have an hobby for life and could do it whenever I am bored in life – Maths. Now I am moving to a phase where I want to do Maths for life. Its uncertain whether I will pull this off but I was not certain of those dreams an year ago !  I did chase them, but they werent kind. I had patience,perseverance and did go on with what came my way. Randomness did play its part but so did I. Today I am here with a feeling that I am the right place at the right moment. It is just the same place but its me who got changed.

When many people questioned my move of  doing a lesser known course, I wasnt moved by their question . But some where inside a corner I had this fear of failure. What if it doesnt work? I didnt and dont yet have a concrete answer for what do you do after a course in maths. But today I would say that what not I can do with a course in Maths. For its the language in which universe was described. Right now it aids me in deconstructing world one piece at a time. I chased  a dream and it did come true! Last but not least I have no words to thank my wonderful teachers who have put together an intensive symposium on Mathematical modelling keeping in mind our needs by bringing in some of the best people in India. My life here can be divided in two periods. Before April 5 2013 and after April 6 2013.

Thanks to all the good hearts who help me evolve by sharing their experience in various forms. I am just a vector in a vector space formed with you guys as the basis ! Not to list names, but if you are reading this you would be knowing if you are the one being thanked – Thank you!