This blog post is about 3 documents I found recently, which are both interesting and correlating.

The first is the 1998 article by Francis Crick and Christof Koch with the title : Consciousness and Neuroscience.

The second is a brochure by SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) about the possibility of a carrier as a mathematician.

And finally, Wolfgang Klimesch’s article on EEG oscillations in alpha and theta band.

It’s been about 10 days since I came back from Denmark.

My return flight was through Zürich, so I went for the 2nd time downtown, where I visited ETH and University of Zürich and I had a coffee at the very nice Cafe Zähringer.

Following are some facts about Denmark and Copenhagen.

One of the most interesting things in Denmark is the love of Danish people for the bicycle.

You can see literally hundreds of thousands of bikes in Copenhagen and the rest of Denmark.

Bike lanes are everywhere, and Copenhagen is flat, so the best option for small-medium distances traveling is the bike. There is a cultural tendency towards stealing bikes. Everybody lock their bike with an interesting mechanism that only blocks the rare wheel, since you want to avoid people using your bike, but nobody is going to take it and sell it. So you shouldn’t leave your bike unlocked at anytime since there is a good chance that a drunk guy will make his ride home easier with it. From time to time, and if you are lucky, you can find the “free bikes”. These are bikes that are locked in various places around Copenhagen (that no local knows where they are ) and you can use them with 20 Kroner which you get back when you return the bike. However, they are really crappy and rare, so you don’t want to count on them to go home.

Apart from this, Copenhagen has a really extended network of train, metro and bus which can get you everywhere. It is fast, clean but (at least for my standards) super expensive. Each ride costs about 30-50 Kroner (4-7 Euro), however you can use special tickets that can bring the cost down to about the half.

Since we are talking about the cost of living in Denmark, I should mention that most things are more expensive than other countries (about 1.5 - 2 times the prices in Athens) but the salaries are much higher.

This is a rough estimation, but most of the people make more than 2000 Euros per month, while the basic salary in Greece is about 650-700 Euros. It is interesting that the taxes there range from 48% to 60% and the VAT is 25%. This is reflected to the quality of life and the public services there, but it still sounds high.

Another interesting fact is the tax applied to the car ownership.

When you buy a car, you have to pay about twice the price of it as a tax. This means that if you buy a car costing 20.000 Euros, you will pay 60.000 in total. However you can still find a lot of cars in Copenhagen.

The food in Denmark is absolutely great. They have some super tasty breads and cheese, and nice wine.

People there know how to eat well, but you can still find hot dogs at a pølsevogn, Smørrebrød (Danish open sandwich) and falafel almost everywhere.

You can find my photos from Copenhagen, here.

Things to do in Copenhagen (and around)

This is a not-exhaustive list of things to do.

1) Go to Christiania (talk to people, walk around and see the houses - not only the Pusher Street and the cafes).

2) Walk down Strøget (the longest pedestrian shopping area in Europe).

3) Go to Tivoli Gardens (amusement park - didn’t try it).

4) Hang out at the peaceful garden of the Decoration Art Museum.

5) DO NOT visit the little mermaid. It just sucks. But I know you will, everybody does!

But you should also visit the very nice fountain near the mermaid, with the 3 bulls. This is impressive.

6) Go to Sweden (either to Helsingborg with the boat or to Malmö by train)

7) Visit the Karlsberg brewery.

8 ) Visit the areas near Copenhagen (e.g. Dyrrehaven & Baken, some parts of the beach, the lake of Lyngby and so many others).

I will end my stories from Denmark, with this representation of the Petersen graph (the smallest bridgeless cubic graph with no three-edge-coloring), discovered by the prominent Danish mathematician Julius Petersen

Εάν οι φυσικές ή πνευματικές σου ικανότητες είναι ανώτερες αυτών που σε περιβάλλουν, αυτές σου οι δεξιότητες, αυτά τα δώρα της φύσης, δεν πρέπει να χρησιμοποιηθούν σαν μια πλατφόρμα για να υψωθείς πιο ψηλά από τους λιγότερο χαρισματικούς συντρόφους σου, αλλά πρέπει να χρησιμοποιηθούν σαν ένας συλλογικός θησαυρός, και το γεγονός αυτό θα πρέπει να σου δίνει μεγαλύτερη ικανοποίηση από το τελευταίο μοντέλο τηλεόρασης που ο γείτονας σου δεν μπορεί να αποκτήσει και τόσα άλλα πράγματα, τόσο εξελιγμένα όσο κι άχρηστα, που σου επιτρέπουν
–σ’ αυτή την κοινωνία που κάθε ηθική αξία έχει ανατραπεί– να αισθάνεσαι δυνατός, έξυπνος, φθασμένος…

Απο το βιβλίο “Τώρα πια… είναι αργά” του Όρστ Φαντατσίνι (εκδ. Διάδοση)

——————————

Μπορείτε να το κατεβάσετε απο εδώ.

If your physical or mental abilities are higher than those of the people around you, these abilities of yours, these gifts from the nature, should not be used as a platform for you to be raised above the less gifted comrades of yours. They have to be used as a collective treasure, and this fact should give you more pleasure than the last television model that your neighbor can’t have and all these things, so hi-tech and so useless, that allow you - in this society that every ethical values have been nullified - to feel strong, smart, accomplished…

Excerpt (translated in English by me) from a book of Horst Fantazzini.

End of the first week here at DTU and the 66th ESGI and we already work for 2 days on the Industrial Problems.

We had to give some assignments on the end of the first part of the DCAMM Ph.D. course, so I gave one in modeling a company and another one about the use of Charpit’s Equations to solve a Geometrical Optics problem.

I’m on the problem proposed by Novo Nordisc, regarding the Protein Structure Modeling and we try to understand how we can predict the 3d structure of a protein based only on it’s amino acids sequence.

I also found an interesting game, called FoldIt, where people try to solve protein folding puzzles, which is difficult, funny and helps the science.

I’m also happy for buying a card game called SET, which I played last year in Vancouver and couldn’t find it in Greece. The day I bought it, I met some great Danish guys in Copenhagen and we played SET while drinking beers on a garbage container, in one of the most touristic places of Copenhagen.

We also went to a thing called Kro, which means “inn”, and is a popular kind of danish pubs.

There we played a danish game with dices, which is something between Kranen and Liar’s dice (I’m not really sure).

Sunday was dedicated to sightseeing. I went to some touristic locations in Copenhagen, saw the famous Little Mermaid, tried to find the Google offices in downtown Copenhagen (no luck with that), spent some time studying at the beautiful garden of the Museum of Decoration (or something ) and then I spent the afternoon in Christiania, where I followed the music and ended up at a punk concert (no live bands at that moment) where a strange and original bike-war was taking place. The teams had modified bicycles turning them into some sort of war trucks and they were trying to destroy the opponent’s truck. It was funny and had a lot of people there.

Apart from that I walked to the beautiful deer park near DTU, found the Dyrehavsbakken, the world’s oldest amusement park (1583) and ended up to the beach, where I was able to wet my hands with the waters of Øresund. There I found a party organized by the local Gymnasium’s students which was taking place at a beautiful location. Tonight I did the same thing but with a borrowed bike, which allowed me to cover many more kilometers in a fraction of the time.

In my next post I’m going to discuss some facts about Denmark.

Reporting from Copenhagen :

Hello people. It is my 4th day here and it is time for some posting.

We had classes for the past 3 days, so the morning were spent on that.

Optimization the first day, Dynamic Processes and Optimal Experimental Design the second day and today we conclude with Geometrical optics and modeling of physical phenomena with PDEs.

We have to hand in our 5 page report on Monday, solving one of the problems given us as assignments by each professor. This is one of the important ingredients for passing this course.

However, the days here are not only about working. I’ve been already twice in Copenhagen and another evening I borrowed a bicycle from a French guy in the Campus Village and did a small trip to Lyngby (the city north of Copenhagen where the university is) and it’s lake.

My first day here and after paying an enormous amount of money for a day ticket (115 kroner = 15.4 euro) for the public transportation, I went from the airport to the university and after unpacking, I visited the city.

I walked around a little bit, watched people shopping in Strøget and then headed to Christiania [1] .

This was an interesting experience and a place I wanted to visit for many years now. However you don’t really feel the vibes of political activism there (anymore). A lot of posers, potheads, tourist groups and a few forgotten hippies. You can see old ladies in a tourist group wandering around and next corner people chilling smoking weed, while drug dealers with huge dogs pretend to be cool.

However the venue there is great. A lot of green, water, areas for children to play etc. The most popular businesses there are Bars and Cafe owned by Christiania members, with headshops and bike workshops following.

I will post soon with more of my adventures in the country of Niels Bohr, Tycho Brahe and the Vikings.

Long time, no see…

This has been a long month… I had some good time in Crete, where I stayed for 2 weeks, visiting Herakleion, Rethymno, Agio Nikolao, Malia, Ierapetra, Matala and other places… South Crete absolutely rocks!

The time in Athens was mostly spent with soirées at our empty houses and  a camping trip to Sounio for 3 days.

I had to cancel my trip to Toronto and Montreal, which is sad, but after giving it A LOT of thought, I’m flying tonight to Copenhagen ([1]), the capital of Denmark where I’ll stay for 10 days.

In the country of Hamlet, I will participate in the 66th European Study Group with Industry and a Ph.D. course on Modern Mathematics. Hopefully I will work on the interesting problem of Protein Structure Modeling.

My flight is through Zürich, so maybe I’ll have some time downtown. i will keep posting with my impressions from this trip.

The last weeks I started learning guitar, so expect to see some posts on the mathematics and physics behind music, a topic that I find really interesting lately.

I also discovered Tryo and Ska-P , two very interesting music bands. I am still trying to read Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” , which has some interesting points on the God debate.

See you soon!

It’s been a while since my last post… My trip to Regina ended, I had a very good time the last few days there and met some interesting people and after spending one day in Amsterdam, I came back to a really hot Athens and the exams… This explains the silence.

For photos from my trip, check here : http://users.ntua.gr/ge04042/photos.html

Tomorrow I finally finish my exams and I will travel to Crete for 10 days, to participate in a mathematics summer school organized by the local math department. I believe it is going to be fun.

4 days ago, we went to a Manu Chao concert… It was very nice.

For some videos from YouTube check here.

I conclude with some “words of wisdom” by Trainspotting…

The IPSW week is ending today, so it is time for a new post.

I worked on the problem of modeling cancer cells growth and trying to find the best combination of anti-angiogenic drugs, chemotherapy and radiotherapy in terms of dosage, frequency, scheduling and side effects.

The problem proved to be *H*U*G*E* and extremely difficult (of course! ). We worked on many different aspects of the problem and we learned a lot in the process.

During the past week, I had the chance to learn many things about Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), since I was trying to solve a 3 coupled PDEs system. I learned how to use Maple’ s PDE features (thanks to Matt) which has A LOT of weaknesses and also the COMSOL Multiphysics program, for modeling of this kind of difficult problems. I also remembered the LaTeX Beamer presentation features.

But the last week was not only about work.

We had the chance to go for kayaking in the beautiful Wascana Center lake, I played a lot of basketball (until I turned my ankle yesterday ) and some cards and we also watched Iron Man in an almost empty cinema where we bought some HUGE pop corn bags!

P.S. 1 : Firefox 3 was released this week, so you can see above an interesting screenshot that I was lucky to take.

P.S. 2 : Google Code Jam 2008 registration already began. First Prize $10,000 plus a free trip to the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California for the finals!

The first week of the GIMMC is over and there is one more week left before I go back to Greece and the exams.
The past week I have been working on the problem of snow removal for the city of Regina.
Our mentor was Dr. Ed Doolittle and we were able to categorize the problem as a Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP). I performed a rough Cost Estimation to show that it probably isn’t worth of optimizing, but people should really use a relatively efficient way of solving it. You can find our presentation here.

Some highlights of the past week :

• We have been walking A LOT! Downtown Regina is about 4 km from the University, and since the transit system here is not very good it is easier to walk this distance.

• Regina has about 180.000 people and is so spread out, that almost nobody walks, even downtown.

• I’ve been 2 times at the Casino Regina, however I didn’t play. Is is interesting watching all these people being there all day long and (mostly) loosing money.

• We organized a poker tournament one night (guess who won! ) and a Mafia game another night.

• I visited some Dollarama and A Buck Or Two shops. They have a huge collection of useless (and sometimes usefull) things in ridiculously low prices (1$ )

• One night, we went to the CBC Studios, and participated in a live radio recording of a special event for the National Aboriginal Day.

My personal suggestions for Regina :

1. The Cathedral Village Freehouse - Nice bar/restaurant, with live music.
2. Bonanza - An All-You-Can-Eat restaurant with nice steaks and good prices.
3. O’Hanlon’s Pub - The place to be when everything else is empty.
4. Trifon’s Pizza - The bar/restaurant near the university. Nice meals, very cheap beer, nice atmosphere.
5. Vintage Vinyl - Great Discs and musical T-Shirts Collection.
6. Wascana Centre - It rocks! Beautiful lake…
7. The Old Warehouse District - Most of the bars are in this area.
8. Lazy Owl - The UofR’s student pub.

P.S. For the last 2 days the Internet connection at the university has some problems, so I can’t upload photos now. But in the next few days, they will be posted on Facebook, so just be patient.

Day one of my trip and I departed in the morning from Athens to Amsterdam. The flight was good and arrived in Amsterdam at 7.20.
I also had the chance to meet the girl sitting next to me, so we walked for a couple of hours downtown,
drinking a coffee at a beautiful cafe watching the river and then going back to the airport to catch my next flight. Amsterdam looks great, a very interesting city with way too many bicycles and a tram. I will have the chance to visit it again for more hours on my way back so I will write more then.

Next flight was from Amsterdam to Minneapolis. The boarding time was 2 hours (!?!) before the flight and they told me to be one hour before that at the airport, so my visit in the center of Amsterdam was short. However it is really easy to go there, since you just get the train from Schipol airport and in 15 minutes you are there.

While waiting for the departure, I had the time for a few morning beers which knocked me of for a large part of the 10 hour flight to Minneapolis. It is not such a bad idea drinking alcohol after all. It can help you avoid jet lag. I cannot even comment on the US officials at the security check before boarding. They were much more polite than in my last trip to the States, but the “a priori terrorist” attitude is still there. So, 10 hours later, a movie (Just My Luck) which I chose from the 40 (???) movies offered and some talking with Cat (a PhD chemistry student going to Salt Lake City) who was sitting next to me, I arrived in Minneapolis.

And then the adventure started… After going through the customs and immigration office I was informed that my flight was delayed for 2 hours due to the strong winds over Minnesota. At this point, my cellphone was not working due to some unknown roaming problem, so I paid 3$ for a 20 sec call to Canada to change my airport pickup time.
But 5 minutes later, the flight had disappeared from the boards. After the first sock that it was canceled, I learnt that it would be delayed for 2 more hours (departing on 1.30 in the night). This meant that I would have to wait in the airport for 10 hours…
By the time of departure, the 41 of us who would be on the flight were the only people in the airport.
We received a 13$ ( ) coupon to cover eating expenses and a 10.000 miles bonus on the frequent flyer program or a 100$ voucher for NortWest flights.
I go for the miles since I don’t think I will be flying with NorthWest again.

Eventually we boarded on the plane and some time after 2.00 we were in the air. But as it appears, this was just the beggining of the adventure.

The time I am writing this lines, we have landed in Regina and are not allowed to exit the airplane, since it is 3.30 in the morning and the agent of the airline company is not here. The customs official eventualy showed up and is right outside the door, but he will not allow us to depart without the agent.
We have been sitting here for more than an hour. They keep giving us free snacks and drins to calm people off, but the situation here is crazy.
The bureocracy of the customs official is attacking the common sense.

Continuation :

Finally, they managed to get the agent at the airport and at 4.30 I arrived at the University of Regina and the 11th floor of the Norh Tower of residensies, 33 hours since I left Athens.
During my first day in Regina, I had the chance to meet 2 of the participants and we went for a long walk to the malls around the university, getting a few things we needed. Roaming is fixed now, my laptop enjoys a new power cable since the old one was almost destroyed and my stomach is still fighting with the McDonalds and Subways, which is pretty much all you can find in the airport and within a walking distance from the university. The accommodation here is simply great and the rooms are huge. However campus is quiet, since the semester is over for a few weeks now, and mostly middle school children are here on summer camps.

I’ll keep posting with more details from the workshop and hopefully more math!

Nikolas

In 5 days from now I will be on a plane going 9000 klm across the world.

I’m going to Regina the capital of the Saskatchewan province of Canada where I will attend the 2008 PIMS Industrial Problem Solving Workshop and Graduate Industrial Mathematics Modelling Camp.

It will take place at University of Regina. It will be a good opportunity to work on some interesting problems and get to learn another city in Canada after Vancouver.

The thing is that the chaos in this wannabe civilized country called Greece has won once again.

I had to reject an offer to participate in a summer program on Mathematical Biology at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute in Ohio, USA since the exams period in our university is in a quantum state.

You never know if and when it is going to happen.

I will write soon with some photos from my first days in Regina.

The last few days a huge stupid-storming called Eurovision (lame music contest) stormed over Europe.

Hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily let the TV suck their brains…

This is my tribute to them…

… So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads…

From Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, by Clay Shirky.

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the Only Wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

…

…

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore
fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed
adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity,
their own or anyone else’s.

…

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Last Edited : 26 June 2008

Here is a list of the summer schools organized in Greece this summer and a few interesting seminars in the next months. As you can see, this is a (scientifically) hot summer in Greece!

Summer Schools

Economics & Econometrics Advanced Summer School (Rethymno, Crete)

EKEFE Demokritos Summer School (Athens)

Mathematical Modeling (Athens)

Non Linear Science & Complexity (Athens)

5th Mathematics Summer School (Heraklion, Creta)

20th Advanced Physics School (Heraklion, Creta)

9th Astronomy Summer School (Volos)

Onassis Foundation Science Lectures (Heraklion, Creta)

Looks in Modern Physics — for high school students

Seminars and Congresses

Stoa tou Bibliou - Free University

12th Panhellenic Conference in Mathematical Analysis (University of Athens)

8th Panhellenic Conference in Algebra, Number Theory and Application (NTUA)

4th International Summer School on Emerging Technologies in Biomedicine (Patra)

8th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (Athens)

18th European Conference in Artificial Intelligence (Patra)

Recently, I decided to learn how to use the functional programming tools provided by Python.

Truth is, it’s interestingly strong.

The whole concept consists of using 3 built-in functions (map, filter, reduce), lambda functions and of course the beloved List Comprehensions.

In order of appearance :

map (function, sequence) : It applies function on every item of the sequence.

You can even provide a function which takes two arguments and use it like this :

map (function, seq1, seq2)

filter (function, sequence) : It returns a sequence of the items which have a function (Item) == True value.

reduce (function, sequence) : It applies the function (2 arguments) to the first two items of the sequence, and then to the result and the third etc…

List comprehensions :

This a powerful feature of Python.

I will explain it by an example :

>>> a=range(10)
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

>>> [x**3 for x in a]
[0, 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729]
Lambda functions :

With lambda functions you can create anonymous functions on the fly.

For example, the normal definition of a function is :

def f(n): return n**3

With lambda functions :

f = lambda n: n**3

In both cases, we use like this :

>>> f(5)
125
An example of using lambda functions with the map function would be like this :

>>> a=range(10)

>>> map(lambda x: x**3, a)
[0, 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729

This is exactly the same as the example in list comprehensions.

So, with all the above we have a whole new range of tools for dealing with lists.