In the Berkeley hills are several facilities related to science. The Lawrence Hall of Science (a science museum for kids) and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) are both named after Ernest Lawrence, the first Nobel laureate at Berkeley. Closer to the top of the hills is the Space Sciences Lab (SSL), where astrophysics research takes place, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI). The grass in front of MSRI is so steep that the grass is cut without using machines:
What is the right way to pronounce MSRI? Most people just say the letters: "Em Es Ar Ai". I know someone who calls it "the Em Es Ar Ai" since, strictly speaking, its name starts with "the". (I wonder if that person is careful never to say "ATM machine" since that is really saying "automated teller machine machine".) When I was in graduate school I heard some other students pronounce MSRI as "Misery", although the MSRI administrators obviously don't like that; the name of their newsletter is "Emissary".
MSRI is surrounded on one side by trees
and from a patio you get views of the SF bay:
To reach the patio, I stepped out a door from the library, but when I returned to the door it was locked. I knocked on the door but nobody was nearby to hear it. Through a window I found a student in the library reading a book (click on the photo below)
but he was so absorbed by his reading that my shouting and hand-waving didn't get his attention. I thought of throwing a rock at the window but decided that was not a good idea. Eventually the student noticed me and came around to open the door.
The books in the library at MSRI are arranged not by Dewey decimal call number but by the author's last name. Thus you can't easily look at all the books in the MSRI library on, say, probability theory. But you can see how much shelf space is taken up by all of Serge Lang's books:
Click on the photo for a better view. The books by Serge Lang start on the top shelf after the big book on origami (whose author is some other person named Lang) and continue to the end of the next shelf. Strictly speaking, not all the books by Lang are here. Some might be checked out of the library, but more importantly his jointly authored books (e.g., with Fulton on Riemann-Roch algebra) are shelved under the other author's name when it comes earlier in the alphabet.
The entrance to MSRI is called Chern Hall, in honor of its first director.
Does that make courses taught here Chern classes?
There are no permanent faculty at MSRI, although anyone who becomes the director of MSRI is appointed to a faculty position in the math department at Berkeley. For example, the current director Robert Bryant used to be a professor at Duke. There is a math department at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and all of their faculty have positions at Berkeley too.
One of the previous MSRI directors, David Eisenbud, came up with the idea of changing the street name for MSRI from Centennial Drive to Gauss Way. Centennial Drive is a long road so Eisenbud just wanted the small part at the end of the road, where MSRI is located, to be renamed. The only buildings on the road which are close to MSRI belong to the Space Sciences Lab, and the people at SSL supported changing the name of the road to Gauss Way since Gauss is famous in astronomy: the method of least squares approximation was discovered by Gauss in his work on locating the asteroid Ceres.
The street number for SSL is 7 and the number for MSRI is 17:
The number 17 is deliberate, since the first famous result of Gauss in mathematics was his discovery of a straightedge and compass construction of a regular 17-gon. To the left of the doors at the entrance to MSRI is a painted image of Gauss's construction of the regular 17-gon (click on the photo and look at the line segments around the boundary circle):
Here is a view of the 17-gon construction from inside the building, which offers a better contrast:
Last week at MSRI I attended a talk by Manjul Bhargava. It involved discriminants of cubic polynomials. For a quadratic polynomial ax2 + bx + c, its discriminant is b2 - 4ac, which everyone learns as part of the quadratic formula in high school. The discriminant of a cubic polynomial ax3 + bx2 + cx + d is much more complicated: b2c2 - 4ac3 - 4b3d + 18abcd - 27a2d2. (This formula has a nice explanation, but I don't want to get into that here.) Many people who work in number theory know the discriminant of the specific cubic polynomial x3 + cx + d (where a = 1 and b = 0), which is -4c3 - 27d2. I had never known anyone who memorized the discriminant of an arbitrary cubic, until I saw Manjul do it in his talk. Without looking at his notes he wrote down the general formula on the board:
Click on the photo for a larger (but somewhat blurry) image. I think even Manjul has not memorized the discriminant of a quartic polynomial.
To reach MSRI without a car, you can take a bus which leaves from the math department at Berkeley every half hour (currently at 10 and 40 minutes past each hour). Anyone with Berkeley photo ID can ride for free. Other people pay $1. The bus makes stops at LBL and the Lawrence Museum of Science before reaching SSL and MSRI. On one ride I took up to MSRI, I saw a rider wearing "gorilla sandals":
There is tea available every day at MSRI and anyone who visits for a long period of time is allowed to make a cup with their name on it, which they leave behind for other people to use:
What is the right way to pronounce MSRI? Most people just say the letters: "Em Es Ar Ai". I know someone who calls it "the Em Es Ar Ai" since, strictly speaking, its name starts with "the". (I wonder if that person is careful never to say "ATM machine" since that is really saying "automated teller machine machine".) When I was in graduate school I heard some other students pronounce MSRI as "Misery", although the MSRI administrators obviously don't like that; the name of their newsletter is "Emissary".
MSRI is surrounded on one side by trees
and from a patio you get views of the SF bay:
To reach the patio, I stepped out a door from the library, but when I returned to the door it was locked. I knocked on the door but nobody was nearby to hear it. Through a window I found a student in the library reading a book (click on the photo below)
but he was so absorbed by his reading that my shouting and hand-waving didn't get his attention. I thought of throwing a rock at the window but decided that was not a good idea. Eventually the student noticed me and came around to open the door.
The books in the library at MSRI are arranged not by Dewey decimal call number but by the author's last name. Thus you can't easily look at all the books in the MSRI library on, say, probability theory. But you can see how much shelf space is taken up by all of Serge Lang's books:
Click on the photo for a better view. The books by Serge Lang start on the top shelf after the big book on origami (whose author is some other person named Lang) and continue to the end of the next shelf. Strictly speaking, not all the books by Lang are here. Some might be checked out of the library, but more importantly his jointly authored books (e.g., with Fulton on Riemann-Roch algebra) are shelved under the other author's name when it comes earlier in the alphabet.
The entrance to MSRI is called Chern Hall, in honor of its first director.
Does that make courses taught here Chern classes?
There are no permanent faculty at MSRI, although anyone who becomes the director of MSRI is appointed to a faculty position in the math department at Berkeley. For example, the current director Robert Bryant used to be a professor at Duke. There is a math department at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and all of their faculty have positions at Berkeley too.
One of the previous MSRI directors, David Eisenbud, came up with the idea of changing the street name for MSRI from Centennial Drive to Gauss Way. Centennial Drive is a long road so Eisenbud just wanted the small part at the end of the road, where MSRI is located, to be renamed. The only buildings on the road which are close to MSRI belong to the Space Sciences Lab, and the people at SSL supported changing the name of the road to Gauss Way since Gauss is famous in astronomy: the method of least squares approximation was discovered by Gauss in his work on locating the asteroid Ceres.
The street number for SSL is 7 and the number for MSRI is 17:
The number 17 is deliberate, since the first famous result of Gauss in mathematics was his discovery of a straightedge and compass construction of a regular 17-gon. To the left of the doors at the entrance to MSRI is a painted image of Gauss's construction of the regular 17-gon (click on the photo and look at the line segments around the boundary circle):
Here is a view of the 17-gon construction from inside the building, which offers a better contrast:
Last week at MSRI I attended a talk by Manjul Bhargava. It involved discriminants of cubic polynomials. For a quadratic polynomial ax2 + bx + c, its discriminant is b2 - 4ac, which everyone learns as part of the quadratic formula in high school. The discriminant of a cubic polynomial ax3 + bx2 + cx + d is much more complicated: b2c2 - 4ac3 - 4b3d + 18abcd - 27a2d2. (This formula has a nice explanation, but I don't want to get into that here.) Many people who work in number theory know the discriminant of the specific cubic polynomial x3 + cx + d (where a = 1 and b = 0), which is -4c3 - 27d2. I had never known anyone who memorized the discriminant of an arbitrary cubic, until I saw Manjul do it in his talk. Without looking at his notes he wrote down the general formula on the board:
Click on the photo for a larger (but somewhat blurry) image. I think even Manjul has not memorized the discriminant of a quartic polynomial.
To reach MSRI without a car, you can take a bus which leaves from the math department at Berkeley every half hour (currently at 10 and 40 minutes past each hour). Anyone with Berkeley photo ID can ride for free. Other people pay $1. The bus makes stops at LBL and the Lawrence Museum of Science before reaching SSL and MSRI. On one ride I took up to MSRI, I saw a rider wearing "gorilla sandals":
There is tea available every day at MSRI and anyone who visits for a long period of time is allowed to make a cup with their name on it, which they leave behind for other people to use:
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