Durwasa Chakraborty

Writing invariants gets treated as an art form, which is a polite way of saying nobody can explain how they do it. “Art is long and life is short,” said Hippocrates, a man who never had to read a 2,000-word post on formal methods. So I’ve tried to keep this one short.

↓ More about this photograph, at the end of the essay.

Lahore, 1929. Image courtesy of British Pathé. There is a photograph that should hang in every classroom in this country: the funeral procession of Jatindra Nath Dashttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatindra_Nath_Das , 1929, winding through the streets of Calcutta. Six hundred thousand people walking behind the body of a twenty-four-year-old who had starved himself for sixty-three days in Lahore Central Jail. He was not demanding independence that day; he was demanding that an Indian prisoner be fed and treated like a European one. He died for the dignity of the jailed, and a nation that was not yet born carried him on its shoulders. Let me say that again: sixty-three days! That is two months of hunger strike and, of course, the beatings, the jail, the pain, the suffering.

As someone with a standing interest in languages, I find myself perpetually on the lookout for the features that belong to one language alone. Every language has its flagship concepts - words that resist translation, and that frequently cannot be mapped one-to-one onto any other.

“You start problem-solving with mathematical thinking. To obtain a solution, you extend it to computational thinking. But to actually implement it on the computer, you need algorithmic thinking” Prof. CPR

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Bangalore for a hackathon at the Indian Institute of Science, organised by Prof. Siddharth Gadgilhttps://math.iisc.ac.in/~gadgil/ and Emergence AI. The structure of the hackathon was: spend the first couple of days getting taught Lean4https://lean-lang.org/ by Prof. Siddharth Gadgil and Prof. Prathamesh T. V. H.https://krea.edu.in/sias/dr-t-v-h-prathamesh/ , then disappear into a cave for a weekhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ and emerge with a project. The judges were Anand Rao Tadipatrihttps://dl.acm.org/profile/99661086046 and Sidharth Bhathttps://grosser.science/team/bhat/ ; both PhD students in mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

There’s a question I get asked often enough that I’ve started collecting answers for it: why do you shoot everything in black and white?

“Call me Ishmael.” That line opens one of literature’s great sweeping saga: a man, a whale, and the bruising, salt-earning adventure of simply not dying at sea. But the name does something subtle: like a polite knock on the front door of literature. It positions the narrator. In Sanskrit, nāma means exactly that: the thing by which you call someone from afar.