Real Thoughts in a Complex World

The title of this blog comes from a math class I started taking this past semester. My professor told the class that "Calculus is the taming of infinity", by which he meant that we can use finite processes to tackle and understand problems that deal with the infinite. Infinity is a hard concept to wrap our minds around. There are many things in life that are like infinity. Learning math can be tough. Hearing that a loved one has cancer is tough. And sometimes, working with big, messy datasets is tough. This blog deals with some of these issues and addresses how I am learning to "tame infinity". So first I want to start with data.

Data is beautiful. We have an incredible capacity to process, learn and make decisions from data. Data can take many different forms: numbers, pictures, sounds, the senses. I hope to tell some beautiful, fun and mysterious stories of my life through the lens of data.

I suppose I should consider myself a scientist. I love the pursuit of knowledge and understanding the behavior of the universe—especially as they pertain to data and mathematics. In contrast, my wife is a graphic designer who has a keen eye for beauty and quality work. She is my personal guide through the world of art, a wonderful incarnation of beauty itself (akin to Aphrodite). She expanded my knowledge of art from Van Gogh to other prominent artists like Mondrian and Rothko, and introduced me to artistic ideologies that inspired great movements around the world. It would be naive to say that art and science are unrelated. Each draws inspiration from the other whether directly or indirectly. I want to show the beauty of the world through data as it has been shown to me through art.

So that I can effectively share this beauty, some future posts will be organized into the following outline:

1) The Data: This is the information I want to post about. The data could be structured data (numbers, figures, graphs, equations, etc.) or unstructured data (such as pictures, letters, text messages, works of art, thoughts, etc). The challenge is to represent data in a way that is different from what we think of as data or that is at least interesting.

2) The Analysis: The goal is to figure out what information we can glean from the data. Just like great literature or a work of art, I ask myself the questions: How do we read data? How should we look at it? What do we notice about the data and what can we infer from what we see?

3) The Story: Here is where I tell the real story of what the data actually say. It might be a life experience or something I learned in a class. It might be the story of a friend or an allegory from another culture. It might be a joke or something funny I heard. This will be the meat of my posts.

The title of this post, Real Thoughts in a Complex World is a play on words for two different kinds of numbers in mathematics. One set of numbers are called real numbers. These are the ordinary 1, 2, 3s as well as fractions like 1/4, 2/3, 5/8 and decimal numbers that go on forever like Pi = 3.14159...
The other set of numbers are called complex numbers. They contain all of the real numbers, plus other "imaginary" numbers like the square root of -1. It's kind of like saying, "All New Yorkers are Americans but not all Americans are New Yorkers." Similarly, all real numbers are also complex numbers, but not all complex numbers are real numbers.*

It has been said by some mathematicians and physicists that we live in a complex number world more than a real number world. In a similar way, I believe that data give us a "real" insight into a world that is more "complex" and that data only tell part of the story. There is a data element and a human element to our mortal experience. I want to capture and beautify data in the context of a broad, fulfilling human experience—the one we call life.

—Derek



*For more rigorous understanding about real and complex numbers, look up "Real Analysis" and "Complex Analysis" on Wikipedia.