Cliff Stoll
To a mathematician, I’m a pretty good physicist… To a physicist, I’m a fairly good computer maven. To real computer jocks, they know me as somebody who’s a good writer. To people who know how to write … I’m a really good mathematician!
Cliff Stoll
Wired.com 12/18/19
Cliff Stoll sells Klein Bottles (more on that in a bit). Sure, he has done a lot more than that in his time. Go ahead and Google him. Do yourself a favor and watch a few of the Numberphile videos that pop up. You will not come across a more interesting person than Cliff Stoll.
Cliff Stoll jumps in the air when he gets excited, and man, is he excitable. Years back, he gave a TED talk, a very good one. Seek it out. Try to count how many times he jumps in the air while imparting his particular type of wisdom.
There are so many different ways I can address this incredible man in an essay. He is a Ph.D. astronomer; his work in that field could take up an entire essay. How about the story of him and the KGB computer hackers he caught in the mid-’80s? Well, a lot has been written about that ordeal. At that point, during the birth of the internet, no one knew what a computer hacker was. Even still, Stoll caught them, and they were brought to justice.
I mentioned Klein Bottles in the first paragraph. Ever seen one? Have any idea what they are? Pictured are some examples taken from www.kleinbottle.com, the site that Stoll owns. Simply put, a Klien Bottle is a 3D representation of a four-dimensional, non-orientable, one-sided object of zero volume. Simply put, that is…
Of course, its 2D counterpart is the ubiquitous Mobius Strip. Below is an example. That object has only one side. Don’t believe me; cut one out and draw a line down the middle. If it is two-sided, the line will never end where it began, right? Draw a line and see what happens.
Klein Bottles have always fascinated me (and yes, they are composed of two Mobius strips). I have one sitting on a shelf in my library. There aren’t a lot of things more remarkable than Klein Bottles. Oddly, though, this short essay is not about Klein Bottles and Stoll’s long fascination with them. This essay is about something else entirely.
I was talking to my niece the other day. She was telling me about the essays she has to write for school. I told her about a class I took some time ago on the topic of essay writing. I told her that I like to bury the lede and put my thesis statements at the bottom of page 17. Being the good uncle that I am, I did not advise her to do the same. I am not sure that eighth-grade English teachers or standardized test graders would be amused at such a tactic. She readily agreed.
So, this essay is a bit unusual for me. I put the thesis statement, the real point of the essay, in the epigraph, right there at the beginning. As a reminder, here is the quote from Stoll once again:
To a mathematician, I’m a pretty good physicist… To a physicist, I’m a fairly good computer maven. To real computer jocks, they know me as somebody who’s a good writer. To people who know how to write … I’m a really good mathematician!
What is the big deal about this? Well, it is something I have known to be true for decades. I know that if you are an archaeologist who understands statistics, you are considered to be a brilliant scientist even though to a Professor of Statistics, you might be seen as pedestrian. That is the way of the world. I shook my head in agreement the first time I came across Stoll’s quote. You have no idea how true it is. In my experience, I have found this to be the way of the world, academic and otherwise.
I think that mathematicians, in general, view the mathematics of physicists as sloppy at best. That is unless you are Edward Whitten, the only physicist to be awarded the Fields Medal, one of the highest honors mathematics has to offer. And suppose you are a physicist who is an absolute whiz with computers. In that case, it is easy to be considered a computer genius until real computer people show up.
And on and on and on it goes. One person’s genius is another’s dullard. When I read what Cliff Stoll said, I was glad to learn that my insight is more widespread than I thought it might be. I was happy to know that I wasn’t the only person who noticed this. After all, one person’s leap is another’s baby step, and in the land of the blind, a one-eyed person is an exalted leader. And on and on and on it goes.
