[Talk Series: Representations] Talk 0: Wherefore representations?

I had previously mentioned about a talk series. It’s happening starting this Sunday. Find details below.

Do you know the legend of Flavius Josephus, a historian living in the 1st century, who beat death through his mathematical skills? How did cluster analysis result in effective intervention for the 1854 London cholera outbreak? Do you know how to multiply two numbers represented in Roman numerals without converting them to Hindu-Arabic system? Why is the Hindu-Arabic system better than others (or is it)? Can you prove with a simple visual representation that every odd integer is the difference of two squares?

Let’s discuss these and more!

Representations. The way information is represented plays a crucial role in how we understand it, draw inferences, do computations on it, and organize it. A good representation makes all of these efficient.

A child can add 573 to 287 (chocolates) with minimal effort. Imagine you doing DLXXIII + CCLXXXVII (Hint: the answer is DCCCLX). If basic arithmetic doesn’t cut it for you, think about data structures. Data structures are ways of representing information such that search and retrieval are efficient. Indexes and other storage models are representations that help your database queries run fast. Good feature vectors help in classifying Cats vs Dogs, and detecting spam emails. (But then it’s the huge amount of legitimate email we get which is the bigger problem!)

In short, from Mathematics to Biology to Computer Science, representations are terribly important. And that’s the broad theme of these talks.

The zeroth talk of this series is going to be a generic one, in which I am going to introduce and motivate the idea of representations. I’ll touch upon some history and move on to talk briefly about a few application areas.

I’ll also discuss a bunch of old numerical problems and explain how the right kind of information representation leads to intuitive and efficient ways of solving them. I’ll illustrate the usefulness of binary and other base systems, as well as the power of powers!

Subsequent talks are going to be focused on other ares. I’ll go deeper into some of the specific topics I introduce in the first talk. In any case, we’ll figure it out as we go based on the level of participation and interest.

I plan to keep the first part of each talk less technical so it is more widely accessible, and move on to more technical details, with some code and demos. I’ll add the slide decks and code (Jupyter notebooks) to a repo if anyone wants to take a look later.

https://www.linkedin.com/events/talkseries-representations-talk6734906411945463808/