something to complain
Recently there are so many things which run against what I have expected. Annoying!!!!! Talked to my roommate last weekend. He said his gf was making the plan for the next whole year. I said I once used to do the same thing. But later I found my plan was just a plan. I couldn't fulfill each item on my plan which made me feel bad. So I have lived in a nonplanned situation for several year. I said I don't trust statistics or stochastic, but I have to admit that life is stochastic. You never know what will happen next. Roomie agreed but told me it is still a good thing to make plan in order to know your daily life much better. However, recent stuffs again double proved that life is a stochastic process. Plan is useless. What ppl need is stochastic control. Changing your plan more frequently and efficiently is a key to live peacefully. Two years ago, I had similar situation as today. I changed but took me almost a whole year. Now shall I take another year to do the second transition? This time there will be much more difficulties and obstacles if I want to change myself again. Talked to old friends, supervisors and they said all is due to myself that I am too nice. Actually that is not nice but "YU1" in Chinese. Two years ago I left Singapore to find a new environment to change myself. Now am I looking for another place to finish the second transition? UCLA might be good place. At least there I may find professors and students doing what I dream to do: PDE, Wavelet, Imaging...... At least I can try to work with Tony.
Math@Stanford
I hesitate to say but this is the truth: falling of Stanford Math. Dept. People may say I am to pessimistic. Well, look at the department now. Is there any applied mathematician there? The real young energetic applied mathematician. The answer is NO. Look at the faculty list: there are 3 new Szego Assistant professors in the department but actually they are in some postdoc track. They can at most be a co-supervisor. However, the problem is that students have difficulty to find the principal supervisor because now there is only one professor who is working on applied math. He is Papanicola. I do not count in Dembo and Diaconis since they have position in Statistics and are there most of the time. Levy will leave soon. He does really good research; he can get the tenure at Stanford. But he cannot find many cooperation and collaborators. He has to go. Tai-ping is almost leaving now. He goes back to Taiwan and is only at Stanford during the winter quarter. All the remaining professors are working on those algebra, geometry, topology, number theory and bla bla. I in nature do not treat the pure math a lot since those things won't bring people too much profit as applied math. They are some toys which can only be owed by a few bunch of people. Even those professors who are working on pure math are not very famous or active nowadays. Most of them are over 60 or even over 70. People say math at Stanford can only rank as a department in some second level universities at most. I totally agree. The weather is always cloudy. Is that because the falling of once prominent department over the world? And could CME develop well enough to keep the best ranking of applied math at Stanford? No one knows. But Tai-ping once said there are a lot of famous mathematicians at Stanford; however a lot of them are not with math department. They would continue promoting math at Stanford. And I think it is also a great time for CME to run forward, to let the university notice that what the faulty it is not to have applied math/scientific computing department at Stanford, to notice the bad of not supporting students working on applied science which is the real useful thing for the world.
