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Earlier this week I was in a bar. I got to talking with a friendly middle aged fellow with thick rimless glasses and a dangerously unruly gray beard. Over the course of several pints of Guinness, his modesty (“I’m just a computer hacker”) gave way to unbridled enthusiasm for discontinuous mathematics. This man is one of the ten or twenty people that Google seems to employ as a type of eternal graduate student.
“I spent the day finding a way to find the second eigen vector of a 50,000 by 50,000 matrix.”
See, the matrix entries are URLs and the second eigen vector sort of points towards the search result. Or something. He talked a lot about his day. Suddenly, his wife entered , explaining that she and the kids had been waiting for some time at the restaurant across the street and was he going to join them or just keep drinking at the bar? He stayed.
This all made me very excited, as it fulfilled one of my West Coast life goals of finally befriending the San Francisco Andy Capp.