There’s a point of view one hears that puzzles me.  Paul Krugman put in the New York Times last week:

“Terrorism can’t and won’t destroy our civilization, but global warming could and might.”

What mechanism of destruction do these people have in mind? Lately I’ve asked colleagues what they think and found no consensus. One proposes that if the temperature rises 2 degrees, that might tip us into a regime where it rises 20 degrees. Another says even 3 degrees might make us unable to farm and we would starve.  Some think the point is that drought or famine might lead to war or mass migration. But then, so did World War II, without destroying our civilization.

My opinion is that global warming is extremely serious and may cause us all kinds of trouble. But I suspect the present mood, in which people elevate this threat above all others, will change when a city is destroyed by a nuclear bomb, or a war starts with Russia or China, or machines grow more capable than humans, or a global information collapse destroys the world’s financial system, or Crispr and the like unleash unimaginable horrors of biology.

[26 November 2015]

Twice in the past 500 years, England has been attacked by a foreign navy. First was the Spanish Armada, with 130 ships, and that invasion failed. Everyone in England knows this great story of English resolve and victory.

The second was William of Orange a century later, a bigger and better-planned operation with 463 ships. This time the invasion succeeded. William landed in Devon in November with his tens of thousands of men and horses and by December was in London running the country. Nobody in England knows this story of English irresolution and defeat — maybe one in a hundred? Luckily, just as before, it was all for the best, and we’ve all heard of an event called the Glorious Revolution.

[29 November 2015]

The Oxford I arrived at in 1997 was pretty much controlled by academics, but lately the bureaucrats have surged. Here are a pair of examples from my department and my college.

In the Maths Institute, I am contractually appointed as Head of the Numerical Analysis Group. For sixteen years, in three buildings, that meant I had a key to NA Group office doors.  Not any more. In our swish new Andrew Wiles Building, it has been decided that to give the head of the group access to NA Group offices would not be good practice. Of course the cleaning staff, the computer staff, and the facilities management staff all have access.

In Balliol, our library holds the Transactions of the Royal Society going right back to the 1660s. Twice in past years I’ve asked for the librarian to unlock the cabinet so I could spend an hour looking at these inspiring volumes.  But I’ve just arranged to do this once again, and times have changed. Now, the librarian will be in the room to monitor me. Though I am one of the most senior fellows of the college, and legally responsible as a Trustee for its property, it would not be good practice to let me touch Phil Trans Roy Soc unsupervised. Of course the library staff can handle these volumes any time they like.

[21 November 2015]

Swinburne was a pretty good Victorian poet. He might make the top ten along with the likes of Arnold, two Brownings, Hardy, Hopkins, Rossetti, and Tennyson.  Among Victorian literary figures overall, perhaps #20?

So my eye is caught by this line from a note on Swinburne in the latest Balliol Record,

“There have been only seven biographies in English since 1917.”

Scandalous!

I wonder how many biographies have been published of the 20th-best Victorian scientist?

[7 November 2015]

The student I caught cheating, having copied answers from an old solution sheet, asked to speak with me after class. He came to my office to explain himself, saying he’d found the solutions by “looking around on Google.” “I didn’t know they were yours.”

Interesting logic. It would be ok to copy somebody else’s solutions, just not mine?

He went on, “I didn’t mean to copy. I was just looking for inspiration.”

More interesting logic. If he didn’t mean to copy, why did he copy? (Word-for-word, in fact, apart from a few errors of sloppy transcription.)

The most interesting bit of logic was the apology he repeated over and over again (it was hard to get this young man out of my office),

“I’m sorry.”

This is the subtle one. To say “I’m sorry” wasn’t completely beside the point, I suppose, since his cheating annoyed me, but then again, it didn’t feel right. It’s not me who was the main victim of his breaking the rules. Society is a machine that depends upon people staying more or less in line. As we struggle to keep it running smoothly, we must remember that it’s human nature to make things personal, to seek absolution from the professor.

[24 September 2015]

Forty-three years ago, I played a trick on my high school English teacher that I have felt bad about ever since. One week, I wrote an excellent piece on some subject or another, and Mr. Terry praised my talent. The next week we had a free assignment to write on anything. Knowing he admired me, I did something reprehensible: I wrote an obscure little piece of fiction that actually had no real meaning. I called it “Icebergs”, an allusion to suppressed memories or some such. But it was pretty much content-free. I deliberately packed it with words that were clearly allusions to something deeper—but the thing is, there was nothing deeper. Mr. Terry was fooled, or at least uncertain, and gave me an A or maybe even an A+. I am ashamed of this story.

Forty-three years later, walking down Broadway after hastening through a Yoko Ono retrospective at MoMA, I found myself thinking about “Icebergs”, and rather incredibly, it occurred to me for the very first time that my act of creating art without meaning was no more than what artists and writers do all the time. Sometimes an obscure work has a meaning, but you can be sure not always—and what’s more, it’s not certain this is a bad thing. (See any of my index cards on Bob Dylan.) How did it take me all these years to realize that my indiscretion was standard procedure?

[7 September 2015]

Kate and I have just returned from ten days at the Balliol chalet, up in the Alps near Mt. Blanc.  We led twelve students in a reading party devoted to Frankenstein and The Origin of Species.  Naturally, God and religion came up for discussion.

I was amazed to find that none of the students admitted to being an atheist.  It’s not that they were distinctly religious; indeed just one spoke in such terms.  Instead, what we heard was inoffensive waffle.  A common observation seemed to be that, well, wouldn’t it would be going a bit far to be an atheist, since religious belief may be good for a society?

These weren’t twelve random 20-year-olds, they were the best of Britain, products of the famous Oxford tutorial system, which proudly claims to develop habits of wide-ranging and rigorous enquiry.  I can’t imagine at age 20 not having made up my mind as to whether God existed!

Some of the seeming lack of opinion may have been British lack of candour.  These students are socially highly tuned, and perhaps some are atheists inside but sense that making their views clear would not be a constructive move.  And this trumps truth at age 20?  Astonishing.

[25 July 2015]

Today I received three messages from Harvard.  The first, at 15:48, began:

Dear Prof. Trefethen,
With just 14 hours left before the end of Harvard’s fundraising year, please consider joining other members of the alumni community in making a gift at alumni.harvard.edu/givehcf.

The second, at 16:57, began:

FEATURED NEWS / JUNE 2015
Big Boost for Engineering and Applied Sciences.
John A. Paulson’s $400 million gift will fuel rapid growth.

The third arrived at 22:15 with the subject line

“Harvard Gift Strategies”

but I didn’t click the READ MORE button.

[30 June 2015]

SIAM journal articles have doubled in length in the course of my career.  At least this is true of the three SIAM journals I’ve checked, those on applied mathematics, numerical analysis, and scientific computing.

Opinions vary as to what has caused this expansion and whether it is good or bad.  Certainly the arrivals of TeX (1980s) and electronic publishing (1997) have helped enable the trend.  In my opinion the essence of the matter, however, is growing professionalization.  These days all i’s must be dotted, all t’s must be crossed, and all referees must be satisfied.  Clarity of writing, indeed clarity of thought, must compete against many other worthy concerns.  A light, clear 10-page paper is easily shot down.  A weighty 25-pager can withstand heavier ammunition.

[13 June 2015]

On average, about one new nation is created each year, and of course, each one needs a flag. Now that fluorescent fabrics are everywhere, enlarging our very concept of the set of possible colors, I wonder, will some new nation adopt a neon flag?

[14 April 2015]