NYT Science puzzlers, Claudine Gay’s resignation, and in memoriam Frank Ryan

Clockwise: src1, src2, src3

Roxanne and George Miller, Claudine Gay, and Frank Ryan are in today’s news. We started drafting a post on today’s New York Times Science section article by Siobhan Roberts on the first two. Then at midday came news of Claudine Gay’s resignation following the unveiling of plagiarism instances in an eighth paper of hers. Then we saw that Frank Ryan, an NFL quarterback who taught mathematics at Case Western, passed away at age 87.

Today we will say more about all three stories.

I (Dick) also intended to lead with Roberts, the author of the NYT article. We mentioned her thrice last year in connection with new aperiodic tilings of the plane and Ingrid Daubechies, and previously on her biography Genius at Play of John Horton Conway.

Review of Journalism source

She is now working on a biography of the mathematical logician Verena Huber-Dyson, forthcoming from Pantheon here. We look forward to that book too. Here is Huber-Dyson’s own self-portrait:

Wikipedia source

Ken notes a visual parallel to Arnold Newman’s famous photo of Kurt Gödel beside a large empty blackboard. That photo was from 1956, however. Huber-Dyson’s was from 1954, in the middle of eight years she was married to Freeman Dyson and bore his first two children.

The Science Times Article

My eyes usually roll over the Science Times—over less-interesting articles on animals or social science or bio-xxx-ical research. Ones on math or computing are relatively rare. This one on puzzles drew my eye just enough to spot a familiar lexeme—an old friend in print or in person:

Knuth.

The article features George and Roxanne Miller as owners of the world’s largest collection of mechanical puzzles. These are things you hold and try to manipulate while seeking a solution. The puzzles can be quite large:

NYT source

The article relates that the Millers are moving from their palatial home in Boca Raton to an actual palace in Italy, along with their collection of over 80,000 physical puzzles. They acquired half of them in 2021 from the British puzzle collector James Dalgety, who thereby fulfilled a longstanding wish of his late fellow collector Edward Hordern and Hordern’s family to find a permanent accessible home for their joint collections.

“You can see why we had to buy a castle,” Mr. Miller told the computer scientist Donald Knuth during the couple’s visit to his house in Stanford, Calif.

There it is—the reference to the Knuth. I was surprised, to say at the least, when the article went on to relate that the two had collaborated on a number of puzzles—including one of considerable commercial success that may look familiar to some of you readers:

Rob’s Puzzle Page source

The article quotes Don saying he “stayed up all night” to devise the hinging of 18 flat squares that allowed the most folded shapes of four cubes. It continues:

As they chatted, he opened a cupboard, jampacked with puzzles. “I keep them all hidden because I don’t know how to put them back together again,” Dr. Knuth said. He pulled out a puzzle named Loony Loop.

Metalog Tools source

“Oh yeah, I’ve got that,” Mrs. Miller said of this disentanglement puzzle: a loop of red cord tangled among four loops of metal.

“I’ve got, I think, the best explanation of the Loony Loop,” Dr. Knuth said, referencing his book “The Art of Computer Programming,” Volume 4A, on combinatorial algorithms. Dr. Knuth later explained that he was interested in puzzles as an educational resource: “I don’t just present an algorithm out of the blue. I say, “What’s it good for?” An algorithm is often good for solving a puzzle’s underlying mathematical problem: In contemplating a puzzle, “the point of an algorithm becomes clear,” he said.

Dr. Claudine Gay just announced today she will step down. This is only six months after she was appointed President of Harvard University. The Harvard Corporation said the resignation came “with great sadness.” But many felt this was the right decision for a while, and yesterday’s Free Beacon article noted several more examples of local opposition to her continued tenure in office.

We just recently blogged about this, ten days ago. We reviewed several of the extant examples and went a little further with comparisons to others’ work, how something like this could arise, and standards in our field. One of the new examples, however, where Gay in 2001 wrote the following parallel text without localized attribution to a 1999 book by David Canon, seems to cut through the subtleties we noted:

Composite of stills from Free Beacon source

The Free Beacon article quotes Canon as saying “This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.” It is true that none of Canon’s ideas was lifted, and these are all Wikipedia-level facts. However:

• Especially when one is already doing footnotes, there is no break-of-flow or any other reason not to throw in something like “Canon, op. cit.”
• If this were computer code, it would be easily flagged by software plagiarism testers.
• The main point—for leaders of an institution—is about setting and conforming to standards required of its members.

Three examples from work by Frank Gilliam also seem stronger than the one from Gilliam’s paper with Lawrence Bobo that we covered in our previous post.

Our third item brings us back not only to mathematics but also to computing. I (Dick—but Ken is writing this) wrote a long time ago of my experiences taking a complex analysis seminar from Frank Ryan while he was the quarterback of the Cleveland Browns in the NFL in the 1960s. He even once came into class with his arm in a sling from a sack he had taken in the past Sunday’s game.

What I didn’t know until reading some of today’s obituaries—and Ken didn’t know, and Ken knows that I didn’t know—was that he soon progressed into something like a university head of computing position. Well, not quite a university. Right as he was gaining tenure from Case Western in 1971, he became the Director of Information Systems for the US House of Representatives. Here is a Washington Post article on his exit in 1977. It is titled, “Frank Ryan Quits Position as House Computer Director.” It says:

Ryan said in an interview that his “main reason” for resigning was to “move on to other things.” He said he felt he had “sort of reached a plateau” in the job. He is said to have played a major role in introducing computer technology to Capitol Hill.

One particular technology noted in today’s obits is that his office—where he managed a staff that grew above 200 people—developed the first Congressional electronic voting system. This cut the time for votes from 45 minutes to 15 minutes, not much different from today.

The particular “other thing” was becoming Director of Athletics at Yale, while still lecturing in mathematics. He moved ten years later into VP positions at Yale and then his alma mater, Rice University, before finishing his career with leading tech positions at several companies. In retirement, he went back to math: the statistics of small-scale movements in futures markets and the conjecture that for every integer , the intervals and each contain at least one prime.

My 2010 post related that not only was Ryan’s arm in a sling, his speech was slurred. This can only have been in 1967, his last real season with the Browns when he had begun teaching at Case. It could well have been the game that Wikipedia describes as:

The season would see Ryan suffering a concussion from a head-to-head collision with Dick Butkus. He was knocked out in the second-quarter but came back to throw three touchdown passes in the third quarter to will his team to a 24–0 victory.

Today’s Cleveland.com obit says:

He was very aware of the dangers of concussions and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) disease from football. He believed that played a role in him developing Alzheimer’s.

Both it and the NY Times note that Ryan donated his brain to the Boston University CTE Center.

Open Problems

These three stories bumped our intent to write our usual predictions post. Do you have any predictions for 2024 in the meantime? The stories may forebode that 2024 will be a bumpy ride. Nate Silver already tweeted: “2024 feels like a high-variance year!”

[authorship and some word and format fixes, three->two children with Dyson]