The Man Who Loves Zeroes

Of course, I am riffing on Robert Kanigel’s excellent book (from 1991, later made into a movie, in 2015, a box-office dud, with revenues around $12 million on a budget of $10 million, although generally positively reported here by George Andrews and also favorably reviewed by Scott Aaronson and Peter Woit):

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan.

Why post about this now?

As you know from The Tepper Network, my PhD students (led by Feryal Erhun), in cahoots with Tinglong Dai and Jay Swaminathan and others, and in collaboration with the Operations and Technology Management Faculty at Judge Business School at Cambridge, have planned a workshop for my 60^th birthday. This excerpt from an email that arrived as I was flying back from Evanston, after attending a wonderful workshop (and excellent post-session cocktails at La Tour and dinner at The Barn) on Ising Machines – a week after Fun, Fun, Fun – where I met up with Peter McMahon, Anil Prabhakar, Hyunsoon Yang, Davide Venturelli and Biman Chattopadyay, while making some new friends, Natalia Berloff, Jennifer Volk, Kerem Camsari and Pedram Khalili among them, is the trigger for this post:

The workshop will be followed by a drinks reception and dinner at Christ’s College.

Now, I knew already that Trinity College is where Srinivasa Ramanujan was – as were Isaac Newton (see What would Newton do?), Bertrand Russell (see What I Believe), and S. Chandrasekhar (see Sridhara Brahmana: Chandrasekhar Limit) – and so I wondered about Christ’s College, and Jake Grefenstette (an Oxford alum, see In Praise of Poetry…and IPF) mentioned that its alums included Charles Darwin (see The Origin of Sridhara), John Milton (see Paradise Reimagined), and, this is when I got really excited, yes, Sacha Baron Cohen, of:

Borat (also known as Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) is a 2006 mockumentary black-comedy film. The film received critical acclaim, and earned $262 million worldwide (on a budget of $18 million).

Now, why do I love zeroes?

First, you know from Having Fun with Groebner Basis and Algebraic Geometry that solving for feasible and optimal solutions of an Integer Program maps to finding zeroes of certain polynomial ideals. (Here is the Management Science paper.)

Second, the highly successful hybrid quantum-classical Graver Augmented Multi-seed Algorithm (GAMA) – and GAGA, which is GAMA within GAMA, see Quantum GAGA – that we have developed at CMU Quantum Technologies Group needs the Kernel of the constraint matrix, which are its zeroes, as its starting point for not only constructing the (partial) Graver Basis, but also for starting feasible solutions (seeds) from which the augmentation – a walk on the lattice – takes place. (See my Mathematical Programming and Informs Journal on Computing papers.)

One would be hard pressed, in my view, to find a Tamil Nadu born Vaishnavite Brahmin as I (ST) am (born in Adyar), to be more Maximally Inverse than Srinivasa Ramanujan (SR, who also was one, and was born in Erode)! Apart from us both being vegetarian, and Srinivasa and Sridhara are synonyms (describing Vishnu), everything else appears to be opposite!

If you have not seen it, I recommend:

A Complete Unknown is a 2024 American biographical musical drama film about American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. The film earned eight nominations at the 97th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. The film has grossed $140 million worldwide (on a budget of about $70 million).

What’s on the plate next week? Check out – recall TEDxCMU 2020: Unconventional Computing – Pittsburgh Quantum Institute (PQI) Workshop on Rivals to Quantum Computing!