User:Fermatprime

MIT SA PROJECT

'K, guys, here's the deal. So the below SA's more'r'less about how I believe in the "Wikipedia model" or whatever, so I figured, why not put my money where my mouth (keyboard?) is. For the next...oh, let's say a week, anyone who wants to can edit my ollege-cay SA here, on this page. Now, obviously I won't make a promise that I'll use any or all of your edits in the final version, but as long as it contributes positively, it should be OK.

Some ground rules:

1. No vandalism, y'all. That's just petty, and it'll be deleted, and why even bother?

2. Don't add too much without taking away some as well. This is supposed to be under 500 words, and it's at 550 now. So yeah.

3. Don't add personal information about me unless you know me really well, and you know it's true, and you know it's relevant.

4. The topic is, modulo deliberate misspellings: "Describe the wurld u com from, forr example you're family, klubs, skool, community, city, or town. How haz that world shapped ur dreems and aspirations?" Anything not relevant to that topic should be deleted. (This includes things in the original.)

So go to it! :D

Endorsements

I like to think I grew up in a nerd’s paradise. My dad has a Master’s in electrical engineering, and my mom skipped her senior prom to go to the state math competition. Our house has always had more books than I’ve bothered to count, and you couldn’t go through a box of them in the basement without uncovering Asimov’s Foundation or Kernighan and Ritchie’s C Programming Language. And when I couldn’t find what I wanted on our shelves, you can bet my mom would show me where to find it on the Internet or at the public library. This upbringing had at least two noticeable effects on me. The first, and the more predictable of the two, is that from a very early age, I had a passion for learning – math and science in particular. I’ve been a voracious reader for as long as I can recall – paradoxically, often to the detriment of my schoolwork. But I’m going to concentrate on the second effect. Throughout my formative years, I had free and unrestricted access to virtually any information I wanted. I was brought up in an environment (at home, at my local Unitarian church, and sometimes even at school) where any sort of positive contribution I had to make was welcomed. In short, I grew up with the ideals of the “free software” and “free culture” movements ingrained in my personal philosophy. So when, late in that temporal wasteland known as “middle school,” I discovered the works of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Lawrence Lessig, I embraced them immediately. I downloaded Firefox and OpenOffice within weeks of their respective releases, and worked like Billy Graham to convert the poor souls who still used Explorer and Word. And (if you’ll pardon the extension of the religious metaphor) Wikipedia was manna from heaven to me. Then, somewhere around tenth grade, it started becoming painfully obvious that I didn’t have all the information I wanted. I would want to read a proof of, say, Szemerédi’s regularity lemma, but if it wasn’t posted to the arXiv or uploaded elsewhere, I would be pretty much out of luck. (In hindsight, this probably started much earlier. I know I never read AKS’ seminal “PRIMES is in P” paper, even though I desperately wanted to.) As you can imagine, this was sort of a there-is-no-Santa moment for me. But instead of just giving up hope, I decided I was going to do something about it. Well, it’s two years later, and I haven’t done much about it. But I’ve taken some small steps. I regularly read and edit Wikipedia and other wikis. I maintain a research blog, on which my various mathematical thoughts are posted for anyone with an interest and an Internet connection to see and comment on. I’m slowly-but-surely developing cryptography software which attempts to get around the patents on several elliptic-curve cryptography schemes and make that technology generally available. Two of the four most recent Fields medalists posted their most famous or important papers as arXiv preprints. Several others maintain blogs or other forums (fora?) where anyone can come together and discuss cutting-edge mathematics. Whatever I end up doing with my life, I hope to make my work as accessible to future generations as previous generations’ work has been to me.

Legal Stuff

IANAL, but it looks like I can hack the GFDL (to which I implicitly agree by posting this on WP) so that I can reproduce whatever comes out of this without it being under the GFDL (which could be thorny, since I'm submitting it to MIT and they AFAIK have their own copyright rules, which might conflict) just by titling the section above "Endorsements." I know, sneaky, right? So please, guys, I'm on shaky legal grounds here to start with; PLEASE don't change the title of the first section. I don't wanna be a copyright-law-violator. ::puppy-dog eyes::

Thanks!