Helen Gregg, AB’09

White noise

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 16:51:33 +0000

Anonymous Tue, 08/15/2017 - 11:51

Physical Sciences Division graduate student Grant MacDonald and a National Science Foundation collaborator install a seismometer in an ice shelf to detect tremors associated with fractures and meltwater movement. (Photo courtesy Douglas MacAyeal)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/17

What listening to icebergs tells us about the future of the Antarctic.

Forty-one years ago Douglas MacAyeal was a Princeton graduate student on his first field expedition to Antarctica. Standing on a vast, barren sheet of ice at the bottom of the world, “you could see almost beyond the horizon,” recalls MacAyeal, UChicago professor of geophysical sciences. He was captivated. Surrounded by an endless snowscape underneath a clear blue sky, “you get thinking that you are the only person in the world that has ever walked within that view.”

MacAyeal was also standing on the precipice of a relatively new scientific field. The term “global warming” had been coined a year before his first voyage to Antarctica, and he joined the University’s geophysical sciences department in 1983, just as research was beginning to suggest the threat that greenhouse warming might pose to ice in Antarctica and elsewhere.

“The visceral act of being in Antarctica coupled with the fact that it was such a pioneering new area of study swept me away,” he says. “I couldn’t not be a glaciologist.”

MacAyeal studies the behavior of large ice sheets, also known as continental glaciers—how they move, melt, and break apart—and combines fieldwork with computer modeling and theory to understand how this behavior is related to climate change. Over the course of his career, which has included 13 expeditions to Antarctica, he’s seen the continent’s ice and very shape change as the global climate does.

He’s heard those changes too.

MacAyeal’s collaborators Alison Banwell and Becky Goodsell venture across the surface of the McMurdo Ice Shelf to recover a water depth sensor. (Photo courtesy Douglas MacAyeal)

In 2001 MacAyeal was studying an iceberg with a surface area larger than Connecticut that had broken off from Antarctica’s ice shelves, the permanent floating masses of ice that surround the continent. Icebergs are the main way ice leaves Antarctica; as snow falls “it builds up to the point where it actually has to flow off.” The snow turns into sheets of ice that slide toward the ocean, slowed by the ice shelves. (If Antarctica were an upside-down pie tin, he says, the ice shelves would be the lip.) Eventually, pieces of ice break off, or calve, into the ocean as icebergs. Glaciologists closely monitor this process, comparing the amount of snow falling on the continent to the amount of ice drifting away—“like bank accountants,” says MacAyeal.

He also wanted to observe an iceberg as it floated into warmer waters, to help better model what might happen to the rest of Antarctica if ocean temperatures continue to rise. Inspired by a colleague’s work monitoring underwater tremors, MacAyeal put seismometers on the icebergs and started recording. From the varied sounds—such as the hours-long, solemn groan of two large icebergs scraping against each other and the sudden bang of an iceberg calving from an ice sheet—MacAyeal’s team found they could track the icebergs by the noises they make. So they kept listening.

The recordings provide more detailed information about the icebergs’ movements and indicate when they are “doing things that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to see either with a satellite or with human observations,” MacAyeal says. For instance, they tip off researchers when an iceberg is being pushed by a current or beginning to break up.

Recently with his graduate students, MacAyeal recorded and studied the “snap, crackle, and pop” of a daily melting and freezing cycle of the top layer of an Antarctic ice shelf. The ice shelves have become a primary focus for MacAyeal as increasingly warm water has affected the ice’s ability to refreeze, and larger, heavier pools of meltwater strain the remaining ice, further speeding up the shelves’ disintegration. The smaller these shelves, the less “buttressing,” in glaciologist speak, they provide, meaning the continent’s ice sheets will more quickly become icebergs. Then it’s like “pouring more ice cubes into the cocktail bowl,” says MacAyeal—sea levels will rise.

Modern glaciology is focused on sea level change, as MacAyeal told Anthony Bourdain when the CNN host trekked to McMurdo Station, the largest research base in Antarctica, this spring for an episode of his show Parts Unknown. Over a drink at one of the research station’s three bars, MacAyeal explained that “we’re still trying to figure out what Antarctica is doing in terms of sea levels”—how changes in the ice shelves or the iceberg calving process will affect the world beyond McMurdo. The goal is to create “some kind of a solid, reliable statement about what cities like San Francisco and New York and Shanghai have to plan for.”

The United Nations currently estimates that the world’s sea levels are on track to rise more than 40 centimeters by 2100, a prediction based on MacAyeal’s work and that of many other glaciologists. In the 1980s and 1990s, MacAyeal was one of only a few scientists creating models of Antarctic ice sheets; now, he estimates, the number of glaciologists “has grown by a factor of 10 to 100.” None knows for sure how a changing Antarctica will change the world, but they’re doing everything they can to find out.

Science & Medicine

Climate change

Notes

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 15:12:34 +0000

Anonymous Tue, 08/15/2017 - 10:12

(Photography by Benson Kua, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/17

Highlights from the latest alumni news columns.

Taking pride

Equality Illinois has recognized the LGBTQ rights advocacy work of Kelly Suzanne Saulsberry, MPP’13, with the 2017 Community Pride Award. Saulsberry is the director of policy and outreach for the City of Chicago’s Commission on Human Relations, cochair of Pride Action Tank’s Leadership Advisory Council, and a board member of SHE100.

Honoring influential women

On September 16 Janet Rowley, LAB’42, PhB’45, SB’46, MD’48, and Sherry Lansing, LAB’62, will be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Rowley, a cancer researcher and University professor who died in 2013, was the first to determine the genetic basis of cancer. Lansing, the first woman to lead a major film studio, now has a foundation that supports public education, the arts, and cancer research. The hall of fame, located in Seneca Falls, NY, inducts eight to 12 women every two years.

Small-screen stars

UChicago talent is shining in the “golden age of television.” Actress Rae Gray, AB’14, recently appeared on Fear the Walking Dead and Grace and Frankie, and actor Eddie Shin, AB’98, had recurring roles on Westworld and The Man in the High Castle. Tami Sagher, AB’95, wrote two episodes of Girls, and Kimberly Peirce, AB’90, directed an episode of American Crime.

Cultural leaders on campus

New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts has appointed Christine Poggi, AM’79, as director, effective September 1. Poggi, who specializes in modern and contemporary art, Italian studies, and gender and sexuality studies, is completing a nine-year stint as a professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania. At Michigan State University, Mark Auslander, AB’83, AM’85, PhD’97, became director of the MSU Museum in July. Most recently the director of Central Washington University’s Museum of Culture and the Environment, Auslander is known for exhibits that tackle controversial subjects through storytelling.

Collegiate leadership

St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, has named Shakespeare scholar Panayiotis “Peter” Kanelos, PhD’02, as president, effective July 1. Previously dean of Christ College at Valparaiso University in Indiana, Kanelos has long focused on promoting liberal arts education. “Peter’s impressive record of academic leadership at Valparaiso and his enthusiastic support for the St. John’s Program made him a great choice for the presidency,” said the chair of St. John’s search committee.

Big thinkers

In April two alumni were elected to the American Philosophical Society. Beth A. Simmons, AM’82, a professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania, is best known for her work on the global political economy, policy diffusion, and the impact of international laws on human rights. Barbara Newman, AM’76, specializes in medieval religious culture, comparative literature, and women’s spirituality as a professor in Northwestern University’s English department.

Legal legend

The Illinois State Bar Association recognized Marshall J. Hartman, AB’54, JD’57, with a 2017 Laureate Award. Hartman began his career as the only lawyer probation officer at the Juvenile Court of Cook County and later successfully argued three cases before the US Supreme Court as a Chicago-based public defender.

Popular president

In May Kim Hei-sook, PhD’87, was elected president of Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, in the first-ever direct vote by faculty, students, staff, and alumni. Kim, a philosophy professor, has been teaching at Ewha since 1987. Replacing a university president forced out by a scandal tied to former South Korea president Park Geun-hye, Kim said she intends to “return Ewha to its original state and restore its honor,” reports the Korea Herald.

University News

Notes

Releases

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 15:07:41 +0000

Anonymous Tue, 08/15/2017 - 10:07

(Collage by Joy Olivia Miller)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/17

The Magazine lists a selection of general interest books, films, and albums by alumni. For additional alumni releases, browse the Magazine’s Goodreads bookshelf

The Painted Queen

Elizabeth Peters (neé Barbara Mertz), PhB’47, AM’50, PhD’52

In the 20th and final installment of Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody mystery series (published posthumously), Amelia, an Egyptologist, arrives in Cairo for an excavation in 1912. She is soon confronted with a would-be assassin, the murder of multiple monocled men, and the disappearance of a precious artifact. Digging into the mysteries leads her to her shadowy archnemesis, whose identity Amelia can finally unearth.

Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission

Barry Friedman, AB’78

From local sheriffs to the National Security Agency, policing in the United States is too often conducted using undisclosed guidelines and with little, if any, oversight or accountability, argues New York University law professor Barry Friedman. Focusing on how facial recognition software, metadata collection, and other technological advances have significantly expanded what police forces are able to do, with or without a warrant, Friedman lays out what he sees as necessary reforms to ensure Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights remain intact.

Twin Mythconceptions: False Beliefs, Fables, and Facts about Twins

Nancy L. Segal, AM’74, PhD’82

Twins don’t always share an intimate emotional connection, most surviving conjoined twins are female, and the fraternal twins of multiracial couples can have very different skin tones. In her latest book on twins, behavioral scientist Nancy L. Segal examines more than 70 commonly held beliefs about twins, debunking myths and sharing recent findings.

Some Say

Maureen McLane, PhD’97

In her fifth collection of poetry, Maureen McLane turns to the landscape around her to make sense of the present moment. Out in the woods or deep in a city, from the farthest reaches of the universe to her innermost self, McLane’s poems occupy space dark and temporal, “in the weather of an old day / suckerpunched by a spiral / of Arctic air.”

Selma: A Bicentennial History

Alston Fitts III, PhD’74

In 1965 images of state troopers beating civil rights marchers in Selma, AL, shocked Americans across the country and helped spur the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year. They also thrust the small Southern city into the national spotlight. In his chronicle of Selma’s two centuries of history, native Alabamian Alston Fitts III explores the city’s growth and influence, with a particular focus on how race relations affected the development of the city, and of the United States.

iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us

Jean M. Twenge, AB’93, AM’93

Move over, millennials. Members of what psychologist Jean M. Twenge calls iGen—those born after 1995—have already begun to shape American culture, and they differ from their predecessors in significant ways. They’re more tolerant, more anxious, less religious, and having less sex—key insights for those who are parenting, educating, or employing the next generation.

Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music

Michael Robbins, AM’04, PhD’11

What is the use of art? Poet Michael Robbins offers an analysis of how pop music and poetry help us live life—from the heavy metal that makes teenagers feel understood to the transgressive poems of Frederick Seidel that give expression to unspeakable tragedy to the late-night a capella renditions of Miley Cyrus songs outside bars that bond strangers on a sidewalk. With essays on artists including W. B. Yeats and Taylor Swift, this collection argues for the utility of all poetry, written or sung—even Journey’s “Separate Ways.”

University News

Books

Releases

iLove UChicago

jmiller — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 18:51:25 +0000

jmiller Thu, 08/10/2017 - 13:51

(Illustration by Laura Lorenz)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/17

Add a little life of the mind to your iMessage conversations.

Add a little life of the mind to your iMessage conversations. Download and install UChicago’s free custom sticker pack.

Now, with just a text, you can delight a fellow Maroon with a bicycling Boyer or an aggressively cute squirrel. Sorry—stickers are not available for Android at this time.

Have a sticker idea for the University’s upcoming expansion pack? Send them to uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu.

New to iMessage stickers? Follow these instructions (pdf).

University News

Lite of the Mind

Tax and spend economics

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 17:52:30 +0000

Anonymous Tue, 08/08/2017 - 12:52

Shops in Germany, 2006. (Photography by Dominik Schwind, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/17

A surprising way to jump-start a sluggish economy.

In December 1991, as the US economy was still struggling out of an eight-month recession, a University of Michigan economist published an op-ed in the New York Times advocating an unconventional strategy for stimulating the economy—an announcement that after one year, a national consumption tax would be added to states’ sales taxes. Consumer spending would get a boost from Americans rushing to make big-ticket purchases before the new tax took effect, he reasoned, and it wouldn’t be a drain on the federal budget like tax cuts or deficit spending. Over the next 25 years other economists published similar proposals featuring an announced future tax increase, though these were theoretical exercises without real-world data.

A few years after the United States recovered from the Great Recession, Chicago Booth assistant professor Michael Weber was exploring unconventional fiscal policies like these. He realized he would be able to take a preannounced sales tax hike beyond a thought experiment—such a tax had already been levied, and he had been there to witness its effects.

Weber was an undergraduate in his native Germany in November 2005 when the government announced that, to bring Germany into compliance with European Union regulations, it would raise the country’s value added tax (essentially a sales tax ) by 3 percentage points, effective January 2007.

Using data on consumer attitudes and spending habits from a marketing research firm, Weber and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology analyzed 2,000 German households’ willingness to purchase furniture, electronics, cars, jewelry, and other high-price durable goods from 2000 to 2013. The researchers then compared the Germans’ propensity to spend with that of similar households in EU countries without looming VAT increases.

The data showed a sharp spike in the German households’ proclivity to buy these big-ticket items in the 14 months between the tax hike announcement and the effective date; in November 2006 Germans were 34 percent more willing to buy costly durable goods compared with the other Europeans and with their 2005 baseline levels. Weber and his colleagues calculated that the increased motivation to spend resulted in a 10.3 percent uptick in actual durable goods consumption in Germany over those 14 months. After the higher tax went into effect, Germans’ appetite for big purchases dropped, but only to preannouncement levels.

Weber even personally saw the impending tax increase spur a consumer into action—he remembers his father purchased a new car a few months before he had planned to in order to avoid paying the higher tax.

Like other economists, Weber and his coresearchers advocate making the policy budget neutral by pairing an announced sales tax increase with income tax cuts, or possibly direct cash payments, for lower-income households to offset the regressive nature of the policy and give more people more buying power.

The study’s findings “might be a little bit behind” for the United States right now, says Weber, as the American economy is on an upswing. But the policy could be beneficial to a country like Italy, which has experienced three decades of negative growth and has high budget deficits. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to “keep our gunpowder dry,” he says, for the next time the US economy needs a boost.

Graphic by Laura Lorenz (Data from D’Acunto, et al., 2016)

Economics & Business

Scav Hunt items worth the most points in 2017

jmiller — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 17:16:17 +0000

jmiller Tue, 08/08/2017 - 12:16

Scav Olympics 2017: Touched by a churro. (Photography by Joel Wintermantle)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The Core

Summer/17

Undersea photography, carousels, snow globes, pinball.

Scav Hunt just turned 30, but this year’s list was full of childhood fun. Throw Scav a grade-school-appropriate birthday party (item #15). Create a UChicago-themed See ’n Say (#176). Design the cover art for Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros.: M. C. Escher (#20). Of the four items worth the most points, three were uncommon takes on youthful amusements.

Item #191.

You’ve braved the South Pole and flown to the highest heights. Now how low can you sink? Your team’s logo photographed as many meters below sea level as possible. (5 points per 100 meters, maximum of 549 points conceivably available to be awarded by the boundaries of modern science)

Item #44.

Rotate, turn, circle, spin, twirl, whirl, pirouette, and twist. That’s what your small carousel, capable of riding two judges and fitting within a square fathom, will do. And it will be themed on something else that rotates, turns, circles, spins, twirls, whirls, pirouettes, or twists. (200 points)

Item #178.

Some people like to collect souvenir snow globes from around the world, but for us, looking at a 2"–diameter sphere from the outside isn’t quite intimate enough. Construct a snow globe inside of which a judge can comfortably explore an intricate scene from any world city. We don’t care about how your snow globe looks externally, but we do expect internal enhancements such as lights, moving parts, and flurries of snow. (150 points)

Item #73.

The original sin of pinball was policing tilts with plumb bobs instead of just making the machine too big to move. Bring us a scaled-up pinkickball “cabinet” themed after your team’s end-times prophecy and crammed with bumpers, lights, and at least one dynamic hazard. Replace those flippers with flipper-themed shinguards though, because we’ll be playing with our feet. (125 points)

Birds and prey

jmiller — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 16:42:01 +0000

jmiller Tue, 08/08/2017 - 11:42

A Cooper’s hawk. (Photography by Maren Robinson, AM’03)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The Core

Summer/17

Chicken hawks on the quad.

Campus pigeons, beware. Two raptors, identified by associate professor of ecology Stephen Pruett-Jones as Cooper’s hawks, have built a nest near Harper Memorial Library.

Colloquially known as “chicken hawks,” Cooper’s hawks—with wingspans of up to three feet—eat mainly smaller birds. They’re stealthy hunters, using trees or other cover to get close to their prey before attacking, swooping in to snatch a blue jay, robin, or pigeon.

In the United States the population of Cooper’s hawks has been increasing over the past 30 years. All they really need are tall trees for their nests and a ready supply of prey.

Pruett-Jones isn’t surprised these two hawks decided to make their home on the UChicago campus: “Cooper’s hawks are becoming very common in urban areas.”

University News

Animals

UChicago Creatures

Notes

jmiller — Tue, 23 May 2017 14:44:45 +0000

jmiller Tue, 05/23/2017 - 09:44

Maura Connors, AB’15. (Photo courtesy Maura Connors)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/17

Highlights from the latest alumni news columns.

Irish pride

On March 11 Maura Connors, AB’15, reigned over Chicago’s 2017 St. Patrick’s Day Parade as queen. She competed against more than 50 other Chicagoans of Irish ancestry for the title and was crowned on January 15. Connors is an admissions counselor at UChicago.

Federal and State appointments

President Donald J. Trump has named Ajit Pai, JD’97, chair of the Federal Communications Commission. An FCC commissioner since 2012, Pai is focusing on reducing regulations within internet and communications markets. Secretary of state Rex Tillerson has appointed Margaret Peterlin, JD’00, as his chief of staff. A former House Republican aide and US Patent and Trademark Office official, Peterlin serves as a liaison between the secretary and his 75,000 employees.

Social health care

Raina Merchant, MD’03, has been named the inaugural director of the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2013 Merchant has led Penn Medicine’s Social Media Laboratory, which studies how data from social media platforms can be used to evaluate, predict, and improve individual and population health. In her new position she will continue this work, with an emphasis on how physicians can harness social media to better care for their patients.

Meeting special needs

Areva Martin, AB’84, has received a James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award for her work in extending autism care to underserved families. Herself the parent of a child with autism, Martin founded the Special Needs Network when she realized how difficult it can be to find and afford the right care for autistic children. She will use the $200,000 award to continue to educate low-income families in the Los Angeles area about the condition and help them navigate the health care system and access available state and federal resources, as well as advocate for children with autism.

Collegiate leadership

Elizabeth Howe Bradley, MBA’86, has been elected the 11th president of Vassar College. Bradley was formerly the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy and head of Branford College at Yale University and the founder of the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute. Her term at Vassar begins July 1.

Movies and mental health

Unbroken Glass, a documentary by Dinesh Das Sabu, AB’06, had its Chicago theater premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center in February. The film follows Sabu’s quest to learn more about his parents two decades after their deaths, one by suicide. In March, Fog, written and directed by Chelsea Woods, AB’11, was featured in the NewFilmmakers Los Angeles’s InFocus film series. The short film tells the story of a successful lawyer who navigates a changing career and the return of her grown daughter while struggling with mental illness.

Who run the world?

In February Shola Farber, AB’12, received a 2017 Young Women of Achievement Award from the Women’s Information Network, a professional networking and political organization. Farber worked for the Obama administration’s National Economic Council and for the Hil-lary Clinton presidential campaign as a regional director in Michigan, and is focused on increasing political engagement among millennials.

Delivered honor

The Evanston (IL) Post Office has been renamed in honor of late congressman, judge, and White House adviser Abner Mikva, JD’51. The Abner J. Mikva Post Office is “the perfect coming together of three things my father loved,” Mikva’s daughter Mary told the Chicago Tribune. “Congress, the city of Evanston, and getting letters.”

A new investigation

Sarah Koenig’s (AB’90) new podcast production company, Serial Productions, launched its first limited-series project in March. S-Town began as an investigation into an Alabama man’s boasts that he had gotten away with murder, but then “someone else ended up dead, and another story began to unfold—about a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and the mysteries of one man’s life.” All seven episodes of S-Town are currently available for free download.

University News

Notes

Releases

jmiller — Tue, 23 May 2017 14:34:27 +0000

jmiller Tue, 05/23/2017 - 09:34

(Collage by Joy Olivia Miller)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/17

The Magazine lists a selection of general interest books, films, and albums by alumni. For additional alumni releases, browse the Magazine’s Goodreads bookshelf.

Waking Gods

Sylvain Neuvel, PhD’03
Author

In Sylvain Neuvel’s sequel to Sleeping Giants (Del Rey, 2016), a team of researchers is working to unravel the mysteries of a towering robot buried on Earth thousands of years previously, when a second robot appears. And a third, and then a whole army. A war breaks out for control of the planet, and the researchers’ discoveries become humanity’s last line of defense against a complete takeover.

Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace

Jeremy Rosen, AM’04, PhD’11
Author

The trend started in the late 1960s with works like Wide Sargasso Sea and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and now authors from Geraldine Brooks (March) to Margaret Atwood (The Penelopiad) have published books that retell classic literature from another character’s perspective. University of Utah assistant professor Jeremy Rosen investigates the new genre of “minor character elaboration” and argues it reflects both a neoliberal emphasis on individual experience and publishers’ desire to market new novels to great books readers.

The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism

Henry Olsen, JD’90
Author

Republican icon Ronald Reagan is the true heir of Democratic hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt, argues Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Henry Olsen—both presidents focused on providing working-class Americans the economic security and dignity of a steady job. Conservatives have been making gains over the past three decades by embracing this New Deal populism, posits Olsen, and should continue to promote the vision that Roosevelt and Reagan shared.

Fallout

Sara Paretsky, AM’69, MBA’77, PhD’77
Author

In Sara Paretsky’s latest V. I. Warshawski mystery, a film student goes missing in a Kansas college town. Warshawski’s investigation draws her into the racial tensions that have long plagued the area, and that may hold clues to the disappearance.

The Great Rescue: American Heroes, an Iconic Ship, and Saving Europe During World War I

Peter Hernon, AM’72
Author

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the US Navy seized a German luxury ocean liner from New York Harbor, renamed it the USS Leviathan, and used it to ferry American soldiers to fronts in France. On the centennial of America joining the fight, journalist Peter Hernon uses the ship and its array of passengers—generals and reporters, nurses and a future president—to offer a unique history of the Great War.

Blast the Sugar Out! Lower Blood Sugar, Lose Weight, Live Better

Ian K. Smith, MD’97
Author

The author of the best-selling Shred nutrition series, physician and media personality Ian K. Smith offers a new five-week plan for reducing sugar consumption with the goals of both losing weight and improving overall health. Providing simple low-sugar substitutions, exercise ideas, and more than 45 recipes, Blast the Sugar Out! aims to help readers eat, and love, healthy foods.

Late in the Empire of Men

Christopher Kempf, AM’16
Author

In his debut poetry collection, Christopher Kempf uses his own coming of age in Ohio and California to explore the United States’ larger history of westward expansion and colonialism. Through imagery and reappropriated rhetoric, Kempf explores how American culture shapes and confines young men.

The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses

Carolyn Purnell, AM’07, PhD’13
Author

Enlightenment thinkers, seeking to make sense of their world, employed sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell in ways that seem shocking today—blindfolded children, intentional addictions, pianos made of live cats. Historian Carolyn Purnell delves into this often-bizarre history of sensation and shows how Enlightenment-era sensory experiments continue to shape the way people experience life three centuries later.

Infinite possibilities

jmiller — Wed, 10 May 2017 18:09:30 +0000

jmiller Wed, 05/10/2017 - 13:09

Ken Ono. (Photography by Bryan Meltz, courtesy Emory University)

Helen Gregg, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/17

How Ken Ono, AB’89, found life in and outside of math.

He had ideas that would transform mathematics, and no one to read them. So in 1911, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a two-time college dropout working as a low-level clerk in southern India, began submitting his work to local mathematics journals and, when they went largely unnoticed, writing letters to mathematicians overseas. He enclosed pages of his groundbreaking theorems and the patterns he was finding in numbers; no proofs, just bursts of mathematical insight.

In 1913 he finally got a response, from Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy. The renowned English number theorist saw the brilliance of Ramanujan’s work and became his mentor and champion, bringing Ramanujan to Cambridge, and his work to a wider audience.

“I did not invent him—like other great men, he invented himself,” Hardy later said of Ramanujan, “but I was the first really competent person who had the chance to see some of his work, and … recognise[d] at once what a treasure I had found.”

Today mathematician Ken Ono, AB’89, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Mathematics at Emory University and a renowned number theorist himself, is on a hunt for those with similar undiscovered potential. His Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Initiative is a global search that seeks out gifted young mathematicians from modest backgrounds and pairs them with mentors and academic opportunities.

In Ramanujan, “we have a man who could have easily been lost to mathematics, and a man who has genuinely transformed the way we do mathematics,” says Ono. With the talent search, “we want to be the Hardy.”

Ono has long felt a connection and kinship with Ramanujan. As a specialist in algebraic number theory, Ono, like Ramanujan, seeks new patterns and truths in integers. He drew on the Indian mathematician’s work in his doctoral thesis and found his footing as a mathematician in part by confirming some of Ramanujan’s ideas on partition functions.

More recently, Ono, with two collaborators, found what he dubbed the “mother lode” of mathematical identities—equations that are true for any value of their variables—using two identities that were among those Ramanujan sent to Hardy in 1913. And his 2014 proof of the umbral moonshine conjecture, which has applications in fields from number theory to quantum physics, drew on work that Ramanujan furiously wrote as he was dying of tuberculosis in 1920.

Ono even helped bring Ramanujan’s story to life as the math consultant and an associate producer on the 2015 biopic The Man Who Knew Infinity. His on-set enthusiasm for Ramanujan was contagious, and the film companies partnered with Ono to launch the Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Initiative last year.

In Ono’s corner office at Emory, framed awards placard the walls. But one frame in the middle, directly over Ono’s desk, holds something different. It’s a letter that Ramanujan’s widow wrote to Ono’s father in 1984—evidence of the Indian prodigy’s deep influence not only on Ono’s work but on his very identity.

When Ono was growing up, his parents often told him how, at just three years old, he had discovered infinity—when he first reasoned that there couldn’t be a largest number since there was always the possibility of adding one. Math was a part of Ono’s life as far back as he can remember; some of his favorite early memories are of sitting at a child-sized desk in the family’s home office solving problem sets while his father, the mathematician Takashi Ono, worked on his next breakthrough alongside him.

Less fond are Ono’s memories of what happened at the kitchen table where, after a less-than-perfect test score or other perceived failure, he would face a barrage of harsh criticism from Takashi and his mother, Sachiko: he was sloppy, he was unaccomplished, he was bringing shame on his family.

Ono was recognized from an early age as a math prodigy. He was included in psychologist Julian Stanley’s well-known Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, and his parents decided he would be a mathematician like his father. All of his time was to be spent studying. Extracurriculars, sports, television, and friends were forbidden. He doesn’t remember being hugged or hearing “I love you.” Ono’s two older brothers were raised the same way: Momaro, a gifted musician, and Santa Ono, AB’84. (Santa, not identified as a prodigy in childhood like his brothers, faced the same parental demands but without the expectations for success—ironic, says Ono, as he considers Santa, now president of the University of British Columbia, the most professionally successful of the three.)

Ono was in high school when the pressure started to become unbearable. As an outlet, and against his parents’ wishes, he joined a competitive cycling team, but it wasn’t enough. He realized he needed to get out of the house and began a months-long campaign to convince his parents to let him drop out of high school.

His ultimate success hinged on a letter that had arrived in the spring of 1984, in a rice-paper envelope from India. Janaki Ammal, Ramanujan’s elderly widow, had written to Ono’s father to thank him for contributing to a statue of her late husband. It was a short letter, but Ono had never seen his stoic father so visibly moved.

Standing in his home office, letter in hand, Takashi told Ono for the first time about Ramanujan, whose story had inspired Takashi as a struggling mathematician in postwar Japan. Takashi even had his own Hardy—André Weil, a University of Chicago mathematician who noticed Takashi’s talent at a math conference in Tokyo and secured him a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1955.

And so, during one of their many fights about leaving school, Ono reminded his father that Ramanujan, his idol, had been a two-time college dropout. His parents relented, and Ono became a dropout himself. Soon he was on an Amtrak train to Montreal to live with Santa, then a doctoral student at McGill University. Santa provided a couch to sleep on, a part-time job at a campus laboratory, and much-needed empathy. Less than a year later, feeling like he could breathe again, Ono started applying to colleges.

At UChicago, Ono immediately embraced his freedom. He joined Psi Upsilon and spent more time deejaying parties, playing foosball, and eating Harold’s fried chicken than studying. He also started competitive cycling again, which is how he met his wife, Erika (Anderson) Ono, AB’90; as a student worker in Pierce dining hall, she began setting aside bananas each Saturday morning, fuel for the kid who came in early with his racing bike.

But at the end of his third year, a visiting math professor who was an acquaintance of Takashi told Ono that his work was subpar and he’d never be a professional mathematician. Stung and refusing to let his parents be proved right, Ono attacked mathematics with new vigor.

During Ono’s senior year, his work caught the attention of mathematics professor and “math pirate” Paul Sally Jr., who was known for mentoring students in Hyde Park and beyond. The two began meeting several times a week, to talk math or just to talk. They bonded over their untraditional paths—Sally had spent several years driving cabs and teaching high school in Boston before deciding he wanted to pursue math—and Sally helped Ono secure a spot in the mathematics PhD program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

At UCLA Ono still heard his parents’ voices telling him that he wasn’t good enough, that he would fail. He almost did fail his first attempt at a qualifying exam in his chosen field, abstract algebra, and was drifting until he took a class with Basil Gordon. Impressed when Ono offered an alternative proof in class, Gordon invited him to come talk during office hours and soon took Ono on as his final PhD student.

For his dissertation, Gordon suggested Ono pursue modular forms, a class of functions rooted in Ramanujan’s identities. It was the first time Ono realized that Ramanujan’s work had modern implications. In 1991, while Ono was at work on his doctoral thesis, biographer Robert Kanigel published The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (Charles Scribner’s Sons). Ono quickly bought the book and read it from cover to cover.

Ono and Gordon held long, intense work sessions on Saturdays, taking breaks to walk up the beach or talk about literature. Gordon could quote long passages from memory; Ono vividly recalls him reciting the opening of Moby-Dick. “I was mesmerized by his ability to make mathematics beautiful by making analogies with classical art, literature, and music,” Ono wrote after Gordon died in 2012. Gordon viewed math as an art form, a way of understanding—and embracing—the world around him. From him Ono learned for the first time to truly, as he says, “do mathematics.”

As he was closing in on his doctorate, Ono drove to Erika’s hometown of Missoula, Montana, to present at a math conference. His talk covered Galois representations, a part of modern number theory related to modular forms. But Ono, wanting to impress his audience, made the mistake of preparing lectures that were too technical. The audience couldn’t follow, and one professor berated him afterward for wasting his time. His parents’ recriminations came rushing back. Ono felt he’d failed in abstract number theory, a subfield in which he thought he was making real progress, in front of mathematicians he deeply admired, and in a city where word might reach his new wife’s family. On the last day of the conference, Ono was driving on a rainy Montana highway, devastated and alone except for the critical voices filling his head. An oncoming truck came into view, and, seeing a way out, he yanked the wheel and steered his car over the center line.

Ono doesn’t remember how he found the other side of the road and brought his car to a stop, only that he sat shaking, terrified. “I couldn’t believe what I had almost done,” he later wrote. “I had never had suicidal thoughts before. … It was an impulsive act that I will never fully understand.”

For almost 20 years, he didn’t tell anyone what happened on that highway, but the following week he had to tell Gordon how the conference had gone. The response buoyed him. Gordon told Ono he hadn’t failed and hadn’t disappointed him. Math, he reminded Ono, is about taking risks, voyaging into the unknown, and occasionally overreaching. Delving too deeply into his topic was a symptom of transforming into a mathematician. It was exactly what Ono needed to hear.

In 1997, at a math conference honoring Gordon’s 65th birthday, Ono’s banquet speech started simply, and without hyperbole: “I thank Basil Gordon for saving my life.”

Ono successfully defended his thesis on Galois representations in 1993. He secured positions at the University of Georgia and then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and cowrote what he calls a “semi-important paper in representation theory.” Despite these successes, voices of disapproval still rang in his head. He identifies it now as impostor syndrome—the persistent belief that one’s success has been unearned, that it’s only a matter of time until one is exposed as a fraud. “When I first started, I was grateful that anyone would come hear a lecture that I would give,” he says. At some point, he feared, other mathematicians were going to validate his parents’ criticism.

Those voices finally started to subside when Ono received an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, an echo of his father’s achievement four decades ago. It was the first time Ono had been recognized solely for his own ideas. “These guys had actually heard of me and knew some of my theorems,” he says. “That was the first time I actually recognized that nothing else matters if you work hard and you have faith and have some luck.”

Later, a breakthrough in partition functions while he was an assistant professor at Penn State led to international acclaim and fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (see “Partition Revelation”). In 1999 Ono received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from president Bill Clinton. His parents attended the White House ceremony, and afterward Takashi presented Ono with the fateful letter from Ramanujan’s widow. Now, he said, he considered Ono the letter’s rightful owner. He added, “I am so proud of you.”

Ono’s relationship with his parents has slowly continued to improve. His professional successes, including appointments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then at Emory, ended their criticism, making room for new ways of connecting. His parents now send cards for birthdays and holidays, events that weren’t celebrated when Ono was growing up. Ono, for his part, has come to understand better why they applied the pressure they did on their children. In his memoir he reflects on the traditional Japanese ideas about child-rearing that his parents brought with them to the States, and how the racism the family encountered in postwar America focused their attention even more intensely on hard work and achievement.

In 2014 Takashi and Sachiko traveled to Atlanta for the high school graduation of Ono’s daughter, Aspen. She and her younger brother, Sage, are now both undergraduates at Emory. They’re talented students but Ono talks up Aspen’s figure skating and Sage’s swimming (he was recently named UAA Men’s Rookie Swimmer of the Year and an NCAA National Champion, Ono says proudly). Ono has raised them to follow their passions and to love themselves as much as he loves them—including their imperfections. Aspen has close to a perfect 4.0 GPA, says Ono, “so I tell her, go get a B and learn that it’s okay.”

In 2016 Ono published a memoir, My Search for Ramanujan: How I Learned to Count (Springer), detailing his winding life path and how it kept leading to the Indian mathematician. (The book is dedicated to his mentors.) It “was good for him,” says his wife, Erika, “to unpack his mental closet.” But Ono also wrote it to help those who might be struggling like he was.

Ono likes to tell his undergraduate classes at Emory that he barely got any As in math during his first three years of college—drawing laughs when he adds, “But believe me, I am totally able to teach this class.”

“They need to hear that,” says Ono, especially from someone as successful as him. He frequently encounters students he can tell are under heavy parental pressure to get top grades and then go into the profession their families favor. “Every class I teach, I will end up having to talk to four or five kids who are not sure about what they are meant to do or be,” he says. “And it’s shocking how often it’s related to, ‘Well, my parents think I should do this.’”

Life beyond college is even a part of Ono’s course syllabi. For years the last question on every final exam he gives has been, “What are you going to do to make the world a better place?” He’s so well known for it that many students write and print out their answers ahead of time and bring them in to staple to the test.

For several years Ono has given an address to freshman parents during Emory’s Family Weekend that includes a bit of his life story. Last fall that talk drew explicitly on his memoir. (Santa has also made use of his life story to help his students; he publicly revealed in 2016 that he battled depression as a young man and has continued to talk about his own experiences while president of UBC as a way to destigmatize mental illness on his campus and encourage students to seek help when needed.)

Ono currently has seven graduate students, who share a workspace down the hall from his office. He’s in there frequently, to check in but also to ask one about her marathon training, or to earnestly tell another that she should really consider Hawaii for her honeymoon.

But in front of a chalkboard working through a problem with one of them, he’s quiet and focused, shaping formulas with rapid-fire questions and rapid-fire encouragement. Ono’s devotion to his students’ work and ideas is effective—and remembered. “When you are working on something day in and day out, it is easy to lose sight of the big picture and the excitement, and he can give that to you,” his former student Robert Lemke Oliver told Emory magazine. “I would not be the mathematician I am today if I’d had almost any other adviser.”

What Ono loves is “watching someone achieve something they don’t think they are ever going to be able to do.” When that happens he delights in saying he told them so. “Nobody likes hearing that, except in this case.” He finds working with students both a joy and a duty, and feels he owes it to his own mentors—and to Ramanujan—to be the best Hardy he can be for the next generation.

In 2014 Ono got a surprise email from Matthew Brown, the writer and director of The Man Who Knew Infinity, based on the 1991 Kanigel biography of Ramanujan. Brown’s team needed help ensuring the accuracy of documents that were going to be reproduced for the biopic. Impressed by Ono’s deep knowledge of Ramanujan’s work and life, Brown invited Ono to be the movie’s math consultant.

On set in England, Ono went to work checking and perfecting all the math that appears on screen. He was present during rehearsals and filming to explain math concepts as needed and to help the lead actors, Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, develop gestures and use inflections that fit both the characters and the math discussed in the movie.

Ono was even able to help when the movie’s prop coordinators, looking for a sample of Janaki Ammal’s handwriting, asked him if he knew of anything, anywhere, that might have Ramanujan’s wife signature on it.

When he saw that Ramanujan’s story was really striking a chord with Brown and others working on the movie, Ono was thrilled. He and the producers began brainstorming ways to help The Man Who Knew Infinity have a lasting impact. “We thought, this film isn’t going to be Batman v. Superman, but for us it’s important,” says Ono. “And so we decided that we should have the film mean something.”

Last spring Ono, Pressman Film, and IFC Films launched the Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Initiative. The project builds on math outreach work that Ono has done for years, and the goal, he says, is to find and support “the brilliant outliers”—young people like Ramanujan who have the potential to make significant contributions to math but have few resources or mentors.

The Spirit of Ramanujan’s mobile-friendly online math and logic quiz directs high scorers to an application. The American Mathematical Society, the Templeton Foundation, and other organizations are also helping promote the initiative, and during its inaugural round, more than 8,000 applications flooded in. The four winners received financial support and connections with professional mathematicians in their fields. Tenth-grader Kendall Clark of Baltimore will study applied mathematics with Johns Hopkins professors this summer, and 13-year-old Ishwar Karthik works every week with a number theorist at Texas A&M’s Qatar campus.

Ono discovered the most recent winner in December during a trip to Kenya. After Ono finished a lecture on his recent work at the University of Nairobi, a young man stood up in front of 500 audience members to offer a correction based on a Hans Rademacher proof from the 1930s. Ono later met with the questioner, Martin Irungu , and discovered he wasn’t an advanced graduate student, like Ono had thought, but a recent high school graduate. Unable to afford the University of Nairobi’s tuition, Irungu had been spending his free time on campus, poring over math books from the library. “He was reading material that a second- or third-year PhD student at a top school would be reading,” says Ono.

In less than 48 hours, Ono managed to secure Irungu a visa to travel to Emory. He spent a week on campus working with Ono’s graduate students and will return for the summer. Irungu also met with other mathematicians from around the country who were in town for a conference. “I ended up introducing him to professors at Harvard and MIT and Berkeley,” says Ono, “and now they’re competing for him.”

Ono is confident the Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Initiative will continue to identify similarly gifted students. “They’re out there,” he says, and he’s going to do everything he can to find them.

It was in London, on the set of The Man Who Knew Infinity, that Ono was struck by an insight that turned out to be a major step forward in proving the umbral moonshine conjecture. Being outside his office and part of a different kind of creative process made the difference, he thinks—and standing face-to-face with Ramanujan (as played by Patel) didn’t hurt either. Ever since his walks on the beach with Gordon, Ono has done some of his best work outside Emory’s stately white-stone Mathematics and Science Center, whether on a simple walk or training for a triathlon (he’s represented Team USA in several recent World Cross Triathlon Championships).

He also likes to work at home on his sofa, in a meditative state, as he thinks through new patterns or ideas. This can look a lot like dozing off, says Erika—fortunately Ono has socks that read, “Don’t wake me, I’m working,” to prevent misinterpretation. The look of contentment is often a giveaway too.

Partition revelation

Ono’s 1999 breakthrough dealt with partition numbers, or how many different ways an integer can be represented as the sum of positive integers.

For example, the partition number of 4, commonly denoted as p(4), is 5, since there are five ways of writing 4 as the sum of positive integers:

4
3+1
2+2
2+1+1
1+1+1+1

Ramanujan discovered patterns in these partition numbers. For instance, he found that for any value of n, the partition number p(5n+4) is always divisible by 5. So when n=5, the value of p(5x5+4), or p(29), is 4,565, which is divisible by 5. The same holds true for any value of n.

Ramanujan also found that the value of p(7n+5) is always divisible by 7, and p(11n+6) is always divisible by 11, no matter what number is plugged in for n. No other such expressions using another prime number as n’s coefficient appear in the work he left behind. In an unpublished notebook, Ramanujan wrote that he wasn’t aware of any other expressions with “equally simple properties” for partition functions.

Ono discovered that Ramanujan’s enigmatic claim was correct—“simple” expressions like the ones Ramanujan found don’t exist, but more complicated ones do. Drawing on other recent advances in partition numbers and aided by a number-crunching computer program, Ono proved that, for all the prime numbers from 5 to infinity, there exist expressions of the form p(an +b) where the resulting partition numbers are divisible by the prime number represented by a.

Ono notes these are often “monstrosities,” like p(48037937n+1122838), which is always divisible by 17. Only for the primes 5, 7, and 11 do the values of a equal the prime divisor. This is likely what Ramanujan meant by an expression with “simple properties,” says Ono.

Ono has since made other significant advances in partition numbers, including devising the first exact formula for calculating the partition number for any value of n. In 2011 he presented this formula and related patterns to a standing-room-only crowd at a special three-day conference at Emory.

Science & Medicine

Mathematics

Physical Sciences Division

Helen Gregg, AB’09

White noise

Notes

Taking pride

Honoring influential women

Small-screen stars

Cultural leaders on campus

Collegiate leadership

Big thinkers

Legal legend

Popular president

Releases

The Painted Queen

Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission

Twin Mythconceptions: False Beliefs, Fables, and Facts about Twins

Some Say

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iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us

Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music

iLove UChicago

Tax and spend economics

Scav Hunt items worth the most points in 2017

Item #191.

Item #44.

Item #178.

Item #73.

Birds and prey

Notes

Irish pride

Federal and State appointments

Social health care

Meeting special needs

Collegiate leadership

Movies and mental health

Who run the world?

Delivered honor

A new investigation

Releases

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Infinite possibilities

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Author

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Author

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Author

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Author

Peter Hernon, AM’72
Author

Ian K. Smith, MD’97
Author

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Author

Carolyn Purnell, AM’07, PhD’13
Author