Lee Worden | worden.lee@gmail.com

A few years ago I started telling friends that I would like to be an applied mathematician for the public, somehow. Unlike pure mathematicians, who work at a remove from everyday concerns and are something like composers, answering to nobody but the Muse, applied mathematicians live more of a have-gun-will-travel life, working for clients, solving the clients' problems, and developing new theory along the way. The clients are often corporations and the military. Does this affect what we study, what we learn, and what we don't learn? Of course it does!

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Consensus project: notes on distributed computing and group processes

Publish Date:

Sun, 11/27/2011 - 21:36

What can we learn from people who know a lot about distributed computing? For instance, Google uses many thousands of computers working together to divide up a search request and get the answer incredibly quickly.

Imagine all the different cities' Occupy movements trying to make a national- or global-scale decision together. A good process might make the difference between doing it efficiently and effectively, and giving up in frustration.

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Consensus project update: The worst teammate ever

Publish Date:

Wed, 11/23/2011 - 18:45

Suppose a group meets to solve a problem, with the intention to find a solution that everyone's willing to accept. This is the basic premise of my consensus research project. Each person values potential solutions (proposals) positively or negatively, and the objective is to find one whose value is positive for everyone. What are good ways to find that solution, is the question. So then...

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11/21: Consensus project update

Publish Date:

Mon, 11/21/2011 - 15:12

For the research on consensus process, naturally I've been collecting reading from this year's Occupy movements. I've just updated my literature review section with those, and with some good documents about popular assemblies in Argentina, Spain and elsewhere.

Here is the updated literature review.

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This week in math for art students: swarms, crowds, and leaderless social movements

Publish Date:

Fri, 11/11/2011 - 11:31

Birds, fish, bees
Craig Reynolds's "boids", Iain Couzin's cancer cells
Slime molds!
Military and civilian swarming in space
Abstract forms of swarming: Anonymous and DDoS tactics; collective innovation and learning, i.e. science, arts, technology, evolution
Critical mass, Occupy Wall Street. John Robb's "open source insurgency"

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Courses for next year: systems; boundaries. Chance operations to back burner.

Publish Date:

Mon, 11/07/2011 - 16:17

Course proposals are due for next year at SFAI. I'm hoping to redo the math class I'm doing now, and also proposing a class on boundaries in biology and human life, based on Alan Rayner's remarkable book, Degrees of Freedom.

Course Proposals on the wiki.

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