Durwasa Chakraborty

This blog has been on my to-do list for a while now. It has been a month since I went to IndiaFOSS, and I could finally finish it thanks to my retreat at the Isha Foundation in Coimbatore, and to two days of an Instagram-free life that let me collect all my thoughts and put them into a document in less than a day.

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 Dasreference for Jatindra Nath DasJatindra Nath Dasen.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 Gadgilreference for Prof. Siddharth GadgilProf. Siddharth Gadgilmath.iisc.ac.in/~gadgil and Emergence AI. The structure of the hackathon was: spend the first couple of days getting taught Lean4reference for Lean4Lean4lean-lang.org by Prof. Siddharth Gadgil and Prof. Prathamesh T. V. H.reference for Prof. Prathamesh T. V. H.Prof. Prathamesh T. V. H.krea.edu.in/sias/dr-t-v-h-prathamesh, then disappear into a cave for a weekreference for cave for a weekcave for a weekyoutube.com/watch and emerge with a project. The judges were Anand Rao Tadipatrireference for Anand Rao TadipatriAnand Rao Tadipatridl.acm.org/profile/99661086046 and Sidharth Bhatreference for Sidharth BhatSidharth Bhatgrosser.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?