DanielGeisler

I got a job working one on one with an autistic teenager. The first month I lived in the woods, but I did have a car to drive to work. A year later I returned to college and lived off student loans for some years. Academia didn't work out, but I made a number of connections with significant mathematicians. A large portion of mathematicians have little coding ability, so I help some amazing people out, learn lots of mathematics and have lots of fun. I just don't make any money, but I'm retired now so it is no longer an issue. I'm now a gentleman of leisure.

I have one of the main websites on tetration at http://tetration.org. Recently I worked on machine language comprehension of mathematics, https://fangornforest.org. I completed a four decade project working with Stephen Wolfram for Mathematica to support fractional iteration https://resources.wolframcloud.com/FunctionRepository/resour....

I now operate as a social activist helping people and non-profit organizations out.

I now have diagnoses of rapid cycling bipolar II and moderate autism, but in the early Nineties I realized I was dealing with ADHD. I was fortunate that one of my autistic abilities was being extremely good at mathematics and computer science. My important adjustment was becoming a computer consultant on projects that lasted several months. I can attack new projects with great intensity, but I fry out after a few months.

While I did great in the Nineties, I didn't leverage my work into a network of contacts. Giant mistake as the Dot Com crash destroyed me professionally. I went from making $65/hr to being homeless living in the woods.

I reinvented myself by going back to college working towards a Ph.D. in mathematics. I ended up concluding that I didn't have the communication skills needed to teach mathematics or the publications needed to be a researcher.

Ultimately I had to give up being a computer professional. I could no longer get intellectually and financially appropriate work. I have continued to work on a number of projects over the last twenty years, so I have preserved much of my programming skills. I have had a popular website for twenty years on http://tetration.org covering what exists beyond exponentiation.

I learned that something one must be ready to completely reinvent themselves to have a chance at happiness.

Wow, GEB came immediately to mind.

Yes.

Dune and Dune Messiah in 22 hours.

No worthwhile ideas. Why, what worthwhile ideas do you see that reminds you of my writings?

I've been wondering if there was anyplace that could diagnosis autism savant syndrome. It may be a useful label to communicate who I am to people. I have my early mathematical biography at https://tetration.org/index.php/Biography.

See 'Entropy bagels' and other complex structures emerge from simple rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39529374 for a related post.

I contacted Dr. Tiozzo about the similarity of the two fractals and he replied,

From Giulio Tiozzo

"Of course, the similarity between the set of zeros of Littlewood polynomials and Thurston’s entropy bagel is striking.

In fact, I proved a few years ago that the two fractal sets the same inside the unit disk!

The difference is that Baez’s set is symmetric under circle inversion, while Thurston’s set is not: the parts outside of the unit disk are completely different."

Dynamics is basically fractionally iterated functions. So the equation should be applicable to all of physics. It also provides a new combinatorial view of dynamics.

I created http://tetration.org which explores what lies beyond exponentiation. My life's work has been to extend the Ackermann function to the complex numbers and matrices. I believe my website lead to a renaissance in tetration research. The following Mathematica code replaces a thousand lines of earlier code. It computes the flows from maps. Combined with the historic three argument Ackermann function it allows the Ackermann function to the extended to the complex numbers.

order=10;

H[0]=0;

H[1]=f'[0]^t ;

Do[H[max]=First[r[t]/.RSolve[{r[0]==0,r[t]==Sum[Derivative[k][f][0]BellY[max,k,Table[H[j]/.t->t-1,{j,max}]],{k,2,max}]+ f'[0] r[t-1]},r[t],t]],{max,2,order}];

Schroeder=f'[0]^t z+Sum[1/k! H[k]z^k,{k,2,order}]

Abel=Limit[Schroeder,{f'[0]->1}]

What is the most significant one line of code that you have seen or written? Ideally something that takes the understanding of the system to a higher level.

I have written a flow function for extending iterated functions from discrete time to fractional or continuous time, known as a flow. One line of Mathematica code that does all the heavy lifting. This provides a foundation for extending tetration and the Ackermann function to the complex numbers.

Flow[f_, t_, x_, L_, order_ : 3] := Module[{s}, H[0] = L; H[1] = f'[L]^t ; Do[H[max] = First[r[t] /. RSolve[{r[0] == 0, r[t] == Sum[Derivative[k][f][L] BellY[max, k,Table[H[j] /. t -> t - 1, {j, max}]], {k, 2, max}] + f'[L] r[t - 1]}, r[t], t]],{max, 2, order}]; s = Sum[1/k! H[k] (x - L)^k, {k, 0, order}] ];

I'm working for the Azimuth Project modeling the Coronavirus and deploying a new math web server for them.I'm learning Category Theory at https://categorytheory.zulipchat.com/. Both are projects supported by mathematician John Baez. The Azimuth Project is righteous as they supported the copying of climate data from the US government when Trump came into office.

I strongly believe that quantum field theory is at the level of tetration or pentation. The others were possible examples. Thanks for the question.

The Universe is a hierarchy of orders; quarks and gluons, atoms, molecules, cells, multi-cellular and on. So hyperoperators form a natural hierarchy to model multilevel systems. Feynman's Path Integral with the integral removed is just tetration. So I believe the higher operators through self organization/renormalization are directly associated with specific levels of reality, but except for QFT I have no suspicion as to which hyperoperators might be associated with levels of physics. Here is how it might work. Hexation might model chemistry while heptation could model simple biological systems. Thanks for asking. This is fun stuff to work on.

Writing Mathematica software with Stephen Wolfram's support to extend the hyperoperators beyond exponentiation - tetration, pentation and so on, from the natural numbers to complex numbers and even matrices. I do this by extending the iteration of any smooth function to real and complex iterates. http://iteratedfunctions.com/ and http://tetration.org/. Physics has two mathematical methods for it's representation, partial differential equations and iterated functions. My work is more general than physical systems or even the universe because I can consider both measure and non-measure preserving systems. I am looking at AI applications as a system that is tuned to solve for physically possible models.

The accepted message length is less than the limit for Twitter. Small is good. Microscopic, not so much. I figured I would just let my message find its own way back to Mozilla from here.

http://www.mozilla.org/contact/

Let me add that the straw that broke the camels back was not my frustration with how Firefox itself ran, but Mozilla's appearance of a trying to radically limit customer input! As a software developer I know things can go wrong, but you always insure that the lines of communication are open. The attempt to limit communicate when things are not going well is tantamount to committing product suicide!

Thanks, this could be a valid issue, but so far my CPU and ARM utilization seem to be much less than using Firefox. Well, time will tell.

I had been running the current version of Firefox until an hour before I visited the site running Chrome. Bad assumption from using one piece of information.

Actually the frequent updates to Firefox break the compatibility of so many extensions that it is rather difficult to run a buttload of extensions.

Dang, I answered too quick. In 1978 I bought a TI-57 and wrote software to study tetration or iterated exponentiation. This was something that necessitated a computer. Soon I began to realize that I was looking at an example of chaos. I now have a web site at http://www.tetration.org with fractals and all documenting my research on tetration.

In 1980 I wrote a program to take horizontal and vertical seismic waveforms and plot them in different 3-D perspectives on a Gould plotter connected to an IMB 360. But let's be honest here, like most serious programmers the nature of the first program I wrote was irrelevant. It was glorious just to write software of any type in any language running on any machine! Hooked on my first byte.

I have profound problems with the standard yada yada about suicide. Yes I believe that life is precious and in my teens I spent a number of years as a volunteer working the phones in crisis centers, so I do know the whole rap. But if life is truly precious our society should treat it as being precious with deeds as well as cheap talk. Society has gutted the mental health system, here in Santa Rosa, CA the two existing mental hospitals have been closed in the last few years. The mental health system is now configured to only act only at the final moment of extremity when people are ready to commit suicide and then with only the mathematically minimal amount of intervention possible. To me and many other people it seems that the science is very clear and that issues like mental health and education can’t be dealt with without dealing with the intertwined socioeconomic issues.

I have a diagnosis of Asperger’s, depression and anxiety. In the Nineties is was a successful software consultant and then the dot com crash happened. I went from being able to get a job anything in a week or two to being unable to obtain a single response to the resumes I would spend out over the course of a year. Five years ago I was given an SSRI for the first time in my life and I had a horrible reaction that almost killed me and the resulted with leaving me with a very serious problem with sensory overload. A few years ago I spoke to the head of HR at O’Reilly who asked me why didn’t I just move down to Silicon Valley where I could make six figures. I didn’t tell the gentleman that I had a serious problem with sensory overload and that I had a hard time seeing how I could function in a crowded urban environment and that living in the semi-rural environment of Sonoma county at least provided me with a quiet place that I could marginally function in.

Now I am having a profound problem with sensory overload that has literally trapped me in my apartment. Loud sounds and large array of other types of sound literally cause me pain. But the experience is actually far worse than pain, because I have a high pain tolerance, but an occurrence of a sensory meltdown can strip me of my very sentience. Because I am now poor I have been absolutely unable to engage in any medical or psychiatric intervention. I have tried to connect with services through ever possible channel I can think of, but to no good. Society’s reaction has been to say, let us know when you are planning to kill yourself, because that is the one thing that we will react to. Several years ago when I first tried to get help for my sensory overload, I realized that few doctors had any idea of what sensory overload was, and none of them had any idea of how to intervene in it. So their answer was to play hot potato with me. One doctor I saw kept redirecting the conversation from sensory overload to asking me if I might be suicidal. When I answered I wasn’t he just kept digging deeper asking me if I wasn’t sure that I was having a problem with suicidal ideation. He was desperate to relabel my problem with sensory overload as a problem with being suicidal because he did know how to deal with that. Dealing with a number of incidents like this over time can make in sick at heart. And mental hospitals are absolutely not the solution. When you can barely tolerate any sound whatsoever the answer is not to lock you up in a noisy environment that you can’t escape from.

So I have begun a hunger strike as a political protest for the lack of necessary services for myself and others. I at least have the intellect to enunciate the problems with the system as so I feel the importance of escalating this to the level of a political protest for others as well as myself. I have started a blog at http://dannyslittlerevolution.blogspot.com/ detailing my issues and concerns, but so far I have received zero feedback. I am now in my fifth day of my hunger strike. So my final comment is to suggest to people that bland statements about life being precious and that people shouldn’t commit suicide because things will get better are absolutely meaningless drivel meant to assuage the conscious of the speaker unless society acts to truly treat life as precious. I get that many in society holds life to be precious for unborn fetuses and for people about to commit suicide. But if life is truly precious it should be treated as being precious during the period of time between conception and death or else talk of the preciousness of life is an absolute sham. My training and gift is in understanding how complex systems work and any system to refuses to deal with the underlying socioeconomic problems is just pissing in the wind. Peace.

I was a tech lead for many years, but I also have a background in psychology and the self-actualization movement. In my first and only role as a project manager I took over a team that had had it's spirit crushed. I took almost a month of working with them through their emotional problems before they were battle ready again. My biggest surprise and a significant disappointment was the amount of psychological counseling that it took to keep my workforce running with their heads on straight.

Loyalty is everything. The first team that I took over was a team that I was promoted from within. The team I was working on was stalled because bluntly they were not very good candidates for the job they were doing. I was the one person making progress and I was making significant progress at that. This was the first software development contract my company has obtained, everything rode on it and the president/owner of the company worked in the programming pit with us, which is how he knew I was making progress. So I ended up managing a group of people who were my close friends and I desperately wanted things to work so that we could all keep our jobs. I extended major loyalty to my team members and was amazed at the depth of loyalty and even fanaticism they returned to me.

Projects are like jigsaw puzzles, they need the right technology and people to fit together to make a greater whole. During the interview process and the continuing during the job I was always working to have a greater understanding of what my employee's goals were and what their path to self-actualization was. When I inherited people who has no interest in self-actualization, in being greater than they were I let go. If you can understand how to plug people into your project in a way as to provide them with a path to their self-actualization your team will follow you into hell.

Be heroic. Through away your job description because it doesn't mean crap. If you are a manager, particularly a technical manager, you personally own the entire project. Your employees are there to help you out. Do what ever you need to make things work within the bounds of ethics. If the team needs you to personally wash their cars in order to maximize the progress of your project then you get off your ass and you wash their cars.

Be a friend and ally to everyone. Most projects have not only technical bottlenecks but political bottlenecks. Even if you are the god of software development, it is not enough. Often being a god of social engineering will get you much further. Be Santa Claus and freely shower the people and organizations you interface with with your technical gifts and screw the fact that this is never a part of anyone's job description. Great managers only care about overcoming the barriers that are in their way. The fact that those barrier are bullshit is irrelevant, the fact that the domain of those barrier are not with your job description is irrelevant. When every single person inside your team and interfacing with your team sees you as a powerful ally and a friend then you can make miracles happen.

Like many people I was very fast to pick up programming, but it still took a couple of years of programming full time before I made the transition to being a very productive programmer. As a programmer who hired other programmers, I was concerned about the skill level of programmers who had just graduated college. As a rule the most productive people I hired had a few years of full time experience.

Like others here I used BlueHost for a couple of years. But for the last few years I have used HostMonster, which is owed by the same folks a BlueHost. Basically companies provide competitive features at first, but don't seriously upgrade what they provide over time. So I liked the feature set provided by the newer HostMonster better that that of BlueHost. Unfortunately HostMonster hasn't upgraded their Ruby on Rails support in a couple of years and so I now have an account with Site5 for RoR, but Site5 doesn't have the sort of reliable up time that HostMonster has.