An eternal pedestrian

I am presently visiting Japan. My host is Atsushi Mochizuki who leads the Theoretical Biology Laboratory at RIKEN in Wako near Tokyo. RIKEN is a research organisation which was founded in 1917 using the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft as a model. Thus it is a kind of Japanese analogue of the Max Planck Society which is the direct descendant of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. I had only been in Japan once before and looking at my records I see that that was in August 2005. At that time I attended a conference in Sendai, a place which I had never heard of before I went there. Since then it has become sadly famous in connection with the damage it suffered from the tsunami which also caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. At least I had even then previously heard of Tohoku University which is located in the city.

Yesterday, sitting by the river in Wako, I was feeling quite meditative. I was in an area where motor vehicles are not permitted. There were not many people around but most of those who were there were on bikes. I started thinking of how this is typical of what I have experienced in many places I have been. On a walk along the Rhine in Mainz or in the surrounding countryside most of the people you see are on bikes. Copenhagen is completely dominated by bikes. In the US cars dominate. For instance when I was in Miami for a conference and was staying at the Biltmore Hotel I had to walk quite a distance to get dinner for an affordable price. In general the only people I met walking on the streets there were other conference participants. When I visited the University of California at Santa Barbara bikes were not the thing on the campus but it was typical to see students with skateboards. Summing up, I have frequently had the experience that as a pedestrian I was an exception. It seems that for normal people just putting one foot in front of the other is not the thing to do. They need some device such as a car, a bike or a skateboard to accompany them. I, on the other hand, am an eternal pedestrian. I like to walk places whenever I can. I walk twenty minutes to work each day and twenty minutes back. I find that a good way of framing the day. When I lived in Berlin there was a long period when I had a one-way travelling time of 90 minutes by train. I am glad to have that behind me. I did not consciously plan being so near to work in Mainz but I am glad it happened. Of course being a pedestrian has its limits – I could not have come to Japan on foot.

My pedestrian nature is not limited to the literal interpretation of the term. I am also an intellectual pedestrian. An example of this is described in my post on low throughput biology. Interestingly this post has got a lot of hits, more than twice as many as any other post on my blog. This is related to the theme of simple and complex models in biology. Through the talks I have given recently in Copenhagen, Berlin and here in Japan and resulting discussions with different people I have become of conscious of how this is a recurring theme in those parts of mathematical biology which I find interesting. The pedestrian may not get as far as others but he often sees more in the places he does reach. He may also get to places that others do not. Travelling fast along the road may cause you to overlook a valuable shortcut. Or you may go a long way in the wrong direction and need a lot of time to come back. Within mathematics one aspect of being a pedestrian is calculating things by hand as far as possible and using computers as a last resort. This reminds me of a story about the physicist John Wheeler who had a picture of a computer on the wall in his office which he called ‘the big computer’. When he wanted to solve a difficult problem he would think about how he would programme it on the computer and when he had done that thoroughly he had understood the problem so well that he no longer needed the computer. Thus the fact that the computer did not exist except on paper was not a disadvantage.

This is the direction I want to (continue to) go. The challenges along the road are to achieve something essential and to make clear to others, who may be sceptical, that I have done so.

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