In March, the founder and longtime head of the NYU Computer Science department, Jacob T. (Jack) Schwartz, died at age 79 — the same week I applied to enter a Master’s program at the department. See excerpts from his New York Times obituary, below.

Schwartz had an intriguingly prolific and varied career. These quotes struck me:
“Throughout his life, Dr. Schwartz, who was known as Jack, moved from one scientific field to the next. He was not a dilettante, but mastered each field in turn and then made significant contributions.” “At his death [at age 79] Dr. Schwartz was actively working on research in both molecular biology and logic.”

Like recently-nominated Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, Schwartz was born to a working class, immigrant family in the Bronx, and rose through outstanding academic attainment to the highest levels of his field.

He attended City College of New York, founded in 1847 as the Free Academy of the City of New York and the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. CCNY has traditionally been a haven for the most talented poor and immigrant students in New York, until recently charging no tuition; it numbers among its alumni luminaries in many fields.

Wikipedia notes:
“In the years when top-flight private schools were restricted to the children of the Protestant Establishment, thousands of brilliant individuals (especially Jewish students) attended City College because they had no other option. CCNY’s academic excellence and status as a working-class school earned it the titles ‘Harvard of the Proletariat’, the ‘poor man’s Harvard’, and ‘Harvard-on-the-Hudson’.” “Even today, after three decades of controversy over its academic standards, no other public college has produced as many Nobel laureates.”

Other alumni of note:
in public life: Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, Henry Kissinger, NY Mayor Ed Koch, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, WWII spy Julius Rosenberg, and Robert F. Wagner, Sr., the US Senator who introduced the National Labor Relations Act.
In the arts: Woody Allen (attended briefly), playwright Paddy Chayevsky, composer Ira Gershwin, director Stanley Kubrick, Sterling Morrison (musician, co-founder of “The Velvet Underground”) actor Zero Mostel, and great modernist photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
Authors: Bernard Malamud, Walter Mosley, Mario Puzo, A.M. Rosenthal (former executive editor of The New York Times), Upton Sinclair, Lewis Mumford.
Also:
Stanley H. Kaplan, founder of Kaplan Educational Services; Andrew S. Grove, founder of Intel Corp; Herman Hollerith, inventor of key punch and electric tabulator for Census Office, founder of precursor firm to IBM; and Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine.

The department Schwartz started at NYU seems to be going strong today: see http://www.cs.nyu.edu/csweb/ for view of the multitudinous and multidisciplinary events & research going on there now.

——-
Jacob T. Schwartz, 79, Restless Scientist, Dies
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times, March 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/science/04schwartz.html

“Jacob T. Schwartz, a mathematician and computer scientist who did seminal research in fields as diverse as molecular biology and robotics, died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 79.

“He died in his sleep of liver cancer, his wife, Diana, said. He was chairman of the computer science department at New York University, which he founded, from 1964 to 1980.

“During a career that also included 42 years as a professor at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the university, Dr. Schwartz wrote more than a dozen books and more than 100 scientific papers and research reports. At his death Dr. Schwartz was actively working on research in both molecular biology and logic.

“Throughout his life, Dr. Schwartz, who was known as Jack, moved from one scientific field to the next. He was not a dilettante, but mastered each field in turn and then made significant contributions. […]

“The son of Ignatz and Hedwig Schwartz, Dr. Schwartz was born on Jan. 9, 1930, in the Bronx. He received his bachelor of science degree from City College of New York in 1949 and his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Yale.” […]

“I see your tweets and status updates, but you haven’t answered my mail”…

Anecdotally I’ve noticed that the rise of social media activity (Facebook updating, Tweeting, etc.) seems to correlate with a drop in direct communication, e.g. email or phone.

You can see how a shift from the latter to the former would make sense, in terms of interpersonal economics. The value of a single relationship must be very high to justify investing effort in a single-person communication, when you can efficiently seek the gains of communicating to an entire social network.

It’s interesting to relate this to what, in economics, is called the “theory of the firm” (cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm). Why do companies or organizations exist, rather than just individuals transacting directly? Why do they exist at certain sizes and structures, and how/why does that change over time?

The firm may be explained as a means to decrease “transaction costs,” reduce cognitive burden, employ team psychology, or cultivate moral reciprocity, etc. It has long been observed than changes in the relative costs of communication may alter the basis for efficient firm size or structure: e.g., email and online project tools may allow projects to be done by freelance teams that formerly were done only within companies.

What strikes me about the shift to social media, though, is that social gratification and broad social status, rather than transaction cost and *local* roles, may be becoming key factors in people’s everyday communication. A co-worker perceived as not part of one’s social world, or a means to social advancement, has decreasing claim on one’s attention, regardless of their “official” or corporate position.

recommended: R. H. Coase 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm”, an all-time-great paper in social science:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2530438/COASEThe-Nature-of-the-Firm. http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/econ352jpw/readme/coase%20nature%20of%20firm.pdf

student days are here again.  Here’s a scan of my new NYU student ID, valid until August 2013 apparently.

lost and found architecture of Hartford, Connecticut — photographs from this weekend.  If you watch the slide show, click on “show info” at upper right to see the comments and explanations.  Otherwise, what was droll may seem merely banal.

I used to live in a tiny apartment (ok, an even tinier one) in which every shelf and cupboard was full of books. Literally, every time I bought another book, I would give away an existing book, to make room. Since I had long ago removed all obvious reject material, this meant sadly considering all my shelves to find the least wanted of my possessions. Often, I would read bits of many books, while deciding. After a while, I realized this is an interesting form of reading. It is like hearing the prayers of the condemned, or picking the next man to throw off the lifeboat.

So, this leads to my latest idea to informationally reduce, restrict, and recycle: the de-Book Club. Traditional book clubs are about sending you a stream of new books, but how gluttonous, 20th-century, un-ecological, consumerist, and burdensome is that? More books is more guilt, more space taken up, more trash eventually.

I propose a book club in which, each month, you have to give or throw away 1% of the books in your library. Your reading, for the club, will be whatever reading is needed to choose the rejects, or to say goodbye to the soon-departed. Implicitly, you read your whole library, because every act of pruning gives greater awareness of what you’ve kept, and the shape of the remaining whole; which is to say, the shape of you.

As Herbert Simon said, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention; so may an abundance of books lead to a poverty of reading. So, perhaps, a pruning of books may lead to richer attention.

There’s a quotation I recall as “Write first for yourself, then for your friends, and only then for the public.” Thought it was Goethe, but I can’t find it. I realize there are various forms of it in circulation, but can anyone suggest what may be the original source of the quotation?