User:Linas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linas is a common given name among people of Lithuanian descent. Lithuanian children are traditionally given one pagan name and one Christian name; thus Linas is the given pagan name, in honor of Linai, the name of the flax or linseed plant, from which linen cloth is woven. Traditional Lithuanian folk clothing is made primarily of woven linen cloth. The Indo-European root lin- also appears in the words linseed oil and linoleum.

I am currently employed by IBM as a hacker working on the Linux kernel for PowerPC-based mainframes. The Linux on the PowerPC wiki is a good place to find out more about IBM Linux mainframes and systems. I've been active in the Linux community; my personal website at http://www.linas.org/ has a set of once-extensive but now stale Enterprise Linux pages. I was a founder of the Gnome Foundation; and I was the lead developer for GnuCash for over 7 years. I've founded three dot-com startups, with real VC money: "Teleport Travel" (later "Intransco"), "Gnumatic", and "Tristel" (later "TQI"). All of which failed to enrich me financially. I was a founding member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board; and spent 8 years learning about and designing 3D graphics hardware and software. I received a PhD in theoretical physics from SUNY at Stony Brook; the thesis topic was suggested by A. D. Jackson and Fred Goldhaber, on the bag model, which combines quark and meson models of the nucleon. I frittered away the marvelous opportunity offered by a year-long postdoc at SPhT-CEA/Saclay at CEA/CEN. Currently, I am utterly infatuated with mathematics, and have made large contributions to over 300 math articles in Wikipedia. BTW, y'all, global warming is for real. Do something about it.

This user attends or attended the University of Chicago.

Volume 3, Issue 14 — 2 April 2007

Archives·Newsroom·Tip line·Single-page·Subscribe

1 Quote of the month
2 What am I doing?
3 Science controversy
- 3.1 What's wrong with WP?
4 ToDo List
5 Handy-Dandy Links
6 ROTFL

[edit] Quote of the month

There's no point in arguing with the empty-product crowd, Jersey Devil. You can point out to them all day long that the sentence "1 can be written as the product of 0 prime numbers" means the same thing as "1 cannot be written as the product of any prime numbers". And they won't listen, or they'll tell you you're wrong. When you ask them to write down 0 numbers and they don't do it, and then claim that they've already done it, and there's "nothing" to it, you can begin to grasp the difference between that kind of formalistic logic and the kind of thinking you and I do. DavidCBryant 19:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What am I doing?

You should have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.

I am using Wikipedia to learn mathematics, both by reading and by writing. In the process, I've generated lots of wacky ideas, epiphanies, and insights into things that should be obvious but aren't. I've made thousands of edits, although almost all of my efforts are limited to math and physics.

Below are some brief essays. They may be wrong, they may be built on false assumptions, and they may make incorrect deductions; they may be "not even wrong" in the words of Pauli. I have not yet given the effort to make these rigorous, although I intend to. I only claim that they are inspired daydreams through topics in math and physics, that may offer insight and understanding, at least to me.

[edit] Fundamental group of Sierpinski carpet

What is the fundamental group of the Sierpinski carpet? The Menger sponge? For some of the difficulties in determining this, see the article on the Hawaiian earring.

linas 16 December 2006

[edit] How to prove the Riemann hypothesis

The Riemann hypothesis arises when a stronger topological separation axiom is imposed on the topologies that commonly occur in abstract algebra, such as on the spectrum of a ring. In particular, there is a short exact sequence that maps spectra of operators to the kernels of the next space in the sequence, having the flavour of Fredholm theory. The spectrum of the operator in the Hilbert-Polya conjecture occurs early in this exact sequence, and is in this sense "dual" to the "usual spectrum" (obeying the weaker separation axiom). (Of course, in the prototypical case, the spaces are the spaces of functions on the Cantor set, which is pervasive in chaotic dynamical systems, and also occurs as the limiting set for cusps of cusped Riemann surfaces, modular forms, the Fuchsian group, etc. But the general case is more general). (Thus, for example, the eigenfunctions for the simple harmonic oscillator form a discrete spectrum only when square-integrability is imposed; otherwise the spectrum is continuous and is defined on the entire complex plane.) Remember: even if I can't (yet) prove this, you heard it here first.

linas 17:48, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More wacky thoughts

Actually, psychologists call them A-Ha! moments, ephiphanies, sudden intuition, or grokking. A collection of older epiphanies into physics and math were moved to a sub-page.

[edit] Science controversy

Wikipedia has become a magnet for anyone with an intellectual life. This includes not only balanced personalities wih legitimate interests, but also promoters, cranks, kooks, snake-oil salesmen, and those with an inflated ego and sense of self-importance. Some of these attentions end up distorting the content of Wikipedia, and tend to embroil Wikipedians in controversy and argument. This is a real problem, and it saps the energies and emotions of the particpants. Good editors can be and sometimes are driven away by bad editors. There is concern that the cranks, kooks and self-promoters will someday outnumber the good editors.

Chris Hillman examines this in far greater depth, in the essay User:Hillman/Digging, focusing in particular on the issue of uncovering the identity of those who make bad-faith edits. Unfortunately, Chris has left. See Wikipedia:Expert Retention for a discussion of why some experts leave WP.

See my page User:Linas/Science controversy for a partial list of controversies I've been embroiled in. See also User:Linas/Arbatsky's principle unmasked for a contentious but interesting topic in mathematics.

[edit] What's wrong with WP?

Current WP policies empower amateurs to the detriment of the content. I gave up long ago trying to create, edit or maintain articles on topics that are widely taught in high-school or college. I was quickly and repeatedly burned by ignoramous but self-assured students who had no idea of what they were talking about. I limit myself to the obscure, arcane topics, where life is mostly placid and peaceful. Some essays on disconent:

|User:DV8_2XL

[edit] ToDo List

Need articles for: quantum pointer state einselection
Resolve inaccuracy in: Fuchsian model
Resolve Talk:Lp space vs. Kolmogorov space question
Review and fix any incorrect usage of J vs. j in j-invariant, Picard-Fuchs equation and elliptic curve, and other articles.
Finish edits before I forget/loose interest: Lagrangian foliation- Moyal product - geometric quantization
Clarify per talk page: Vandermonde determinant
Read these articles: Analysis of flows - BRST - Complex multiplication - Abelian variety - Prym variety - Topological divisor of zero - Representation theory of finite groups
Cleanup: In Sigma-algebra, mention field of sets

[edit] Handy-Dandy Links

Wikipedia:Cite sources -- m:Cite/Cite.php -- Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity -- Wikipedia:Stable versions -- Wikipedia:Make technical articles accessible -- Category:Editorial validation -- User:Linas/Original research, peer review and reputation on Wikipedia --

[edit] Purdy pictures

User:Linas/Pictures contains a gallery of pictures I've created for WP. There are more at my Art gallery. See Wikipedia:picture tutorial for help; and also Category:Math images and Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Graphics.

My favorites include:

invariant g_3 real part

Modular discriminant

Klein's J-invariant, phase

Klein's J-invariant, modulus

[edit] Category sweeps

I've recategorized over 2000 articles on WP, and created several dozen categories. Major category work and cleanup is listed at User:Linas/Categories.