After installing that matrix math library, I spent a week’s evenings pushing several abstract graphs through my “topological coordinates” program and finding, to my lack of complete shock, that none of them had any neat three-dimensional embedding.

Then I tried a torus, and was again far from amazed that it didn’t work well either: all the vertices being equivalent under the inherent symmetries, there’s nothing to distinguish the “inner” from the “outer”.

I cut a seam of the torus to make a cylinder, and then I got a surprise: the free ends curl in like an apple. If anything I’d expect the opposite: the vertices along the edges, being topologically outermost, “ought” to curl outward.

One of these days I’ll get around to fullerenes.

I hear some surprising things in this job. I trust I’m not violating confidence if I repeat this doozy from a discharge report:

At this point the etiology of the [symptom] is still unclear to me; it could possibly be idiopathic but, given that his symptoms have resolved and [test results], most likely his [symptom] has unclear etiology.

Idiopathic or unclear? We report, you decide.

Madhu is getting married in a few weeks — in India. I wish I could go!

If each of my readers were to drop a nickel in the tip jar, that should be enough to buy him a drink when he gets back to Sunnyvale.