Brilliant people

I have been fortunate enough to encounter and interact with brilliant minds with the passage of time. I just thought I'd pen them down. In no particular order, these are the four best minds I've met :

1. Nema

Good friend and classmate at BASE during JEE times. Nema was the guy who was at a completely different level altogether, which we just had to accept. There was no point, absolutely NO point in trying to reach him. We just had to give up and awe at him. I still remember the Physics tests where most of us would score 40-50 on 100 and be elated, and there he would come, with a score of 85, beating the second highest by 35-40 marks flat. He was an absolute God in Physics; his understanding would be completely different; he could learn physics on his own. One of his beauties after which we were left amazed, I remember, was a SHM problem from a FIITJEE test, which none of us got as it was conceptually confusing. Here was our man, explaining to me a macroscopic SHM problem with springs from a microscopic level, atoms colliding - energy transfer in different axis - Motion - SHM. And it turned out to be right! Mother of God! None of us were surprised when the man put AIR 10.

2. Shreevatsa

Another good friend of mine, who also reads my blogs and comments regularly. I don't have much to say about him except for the fact that I decided long back never to solve problems with him; it would humiliate me, make me feel like I should go back to first standard. There was one speciality in him - The problems we all (mere mortals) could solve, he would take almost the same time, and sometimes slightly more. The problems we used to brand as impossible to solve, or just let it go, he would always solve it in less than a couple of minutes. Such are his brains, such is Vatsa, and I'm proud of him.

3. Prahalad Rao a.k.a PR

My Organic Chemistry prof at BASE, for JEE. Well, it seemed to us that God himself had sent him to earth to teach people Organic Chemistry. I mean, how, how how how could a man be SO strong in a subject? Amongst a million miracles PR pulled off in front of us, this was one, just ONE:

There was a problem in Seyhan Ege : Complete the reaction. And two of the reactants were given. I don't remember the reactants, but they were huge with many functional groups that could all react amongst themselves; Siva and I broke our heads so badly for an entire day and couldn't solve it. The answer was given at the end of the book, and the answer was: No reaction. We wondered and wondered, how the hell could there be no reaction when there were SO many functional groups, acidic and basic sites? We decided to make the final move : Go to PR. However, we decided NOT to take the book to him, and copied the problem down on a sheet. Next day, we went. And this is what happened.

Me: Sir, I have a problem. I'm not able to find the products of the reaction (Showed him)

PR: Hmm. (Thinks for 5-6 seconds. Has a look)

PR: This is a bit tricky. But I would say there is no reaction.

Me and Siva: (Wtf Wtf Wtf! How the Fuck)

Me: How sir?

PR: Well, this compound will have pKa of around 6, the other one around pKa 13, so they wont react.


4. Ananthasuresh

I have only two words for him: Raw Genius. Well, I was here at IIT, and I didn't (fortunately or unfortunately) meet many people who I could awe at, like Nema or Vatsa, or PR. That was true till last summer. Till I reached IISc, and met Suresh. It was time again for me to realize how the world is gifted with brilliant people. The difficulty with research (from my limited knowledge) is this: When you encounter a conceptual hurdle, you usually HAVE to solve it yourself, simply because such a conceptual problem at an intermediate stage of research cannot be solved by anyone else unless they are researching on exactly the same topic. In other words, unless someone's working on EXACTLY the same stuff as you, it becomes very difficult for him/her to help you overcome a hurdle, again, simply because he/she would not know what the intricacies are, and the real reason you're stuck. Now, typically this is what would happen: I would work on a problem for 1-2 days, putting full fight. I would reach a certain stage, where I would be stuck. Stuck conceptually. I would try my best to move forward, but it wouldn't happen. I would then meet him to discuss. I would keep talking, explaining what I had done, and there he was - Understanding every little detail. Think of it, he could understand at the speed at which I spoke. At the end of it, he would just smile, and tell me where exactly I went wrong, and how I should proceed from then on. I can't even explain to you the feeling I got during these times. Either it's my inability to express, or it's beyond expressible. The feeling was so great, that to the shock of a few of my friends, I started telling them 'Man, I want to do a PhD here'. Of course it was momentary bliss, but bliss it was.

I'm just hoping I keep meeting people like these throughout life. It gives me a kick. It makes me happy. It humbles me. It makes me think. Think of how I can reach somewhere close to them.

Multi dimensional scaling

I appreciate certain things; adore some. One of these is Bell Labs. The things they do in there, amazing. People work on Robotics and end up writing papers in Psychology. Such was the case a couple of decades back, when a publication (and a small book) came out of Bell Labs, which read 'Multi Dimensional Scaling'. Brilliance, I tell you.

The aim of MDS is simple: Get uncertainty closer to certainty. And when I talk about uncertainty, it's not the quantum world or probability in that sense. It's uncertainty in decisions; when you do not have enough parameters to evaluate, you try reaching a decision based on what you know, however limited it may be. A simpler way to put it would be: Identifying the similarities and the dissimilarities. The best part about this is the fact that people in Bell Labs introduced it in the field of Psychology and explained it's applications. It went on to be a part of Marketing, Data mining, Cognitive Sciences, Psychometrics, Operations Research, what not. A seminar was presented on this by one of the research students when I was there in the IISc Lab.

Take a simple example: I give you three cities, and the distances between any two of them (in pairs). These distances have been measured by an incorrect distance meter. Your job is to find out the actual distance between cities. In case of three cities, you just draw the triangle and get done with it! Now I increase the number of cities to four, and give you distances in pairs. Note that when we add a city, we add three more distances. Which means that for pin pointing the fourth city, three circles have to meet at a point. Which may not, and in most cases, will not be the case. Adding one more city making it five needs four circles to meet at a point, which is even more improbable. This goes on, where for a n city situation, n-1 circles need to meet at a point, for every city. Of course, we know that the distance meter is incorrect, otherwise all distances would be perfect. Hence, we optimize with a so called stress function, which is similar to standard deviation, to obtain pairs of distances, which agree to a reasonable extent with the incorrect meter, overall. We thus obtain how similar the distance meter is, to the actual distance between two cities.

The application of this in Psychology for instance, or psychometric tests is remarkable. Consider an example, where you write a psychometric test. There is no right/wrong in such tests, we know. However, after your responses are registered, an algorithm similar to MDS would be run, with your answers mapped to 'distances' in a certain way, to see how your answers vary from one another. It's like saying: Even if the distance meter is incorrect, MDS gives all distances with errors in distances of different pairs being similar. This however, is true only when the distance meter is uniformly incorrect. Similarly, it doesn't matter whether you're a baby or a terrorist. If you lie in certain questions, in which case you're not being uniformly a terrorist or a baby, the clash in responses gives a high relative error amongst all questions. In which case you get screwed. So never lie.

And Bell Labs rocks.

Update: Regarding the previous post, if you happened to think I was serious, and hence asked me to get a life, or cursed me, please please please, I was joking.