The historic candidacy of Obama aside, the NY Times noted yesterday, in what it called “quiet political shifts,” that more and more black candidates are gaining ground in heavily white areas.

The columnists cite a study by Cambridge author Zoltan Hajnal, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. According to his figures, about 40 percent of Americans have lived in or near cities that have elected black mayors or in states with black governors.

Most black elected officials, however, still represent predominantly black communities. And Dr. Hajnal and other analysts say racial animosity toward black candidates still exists and may affect the results of local and national elections, including the race for president. But he said such feelings were declining.

“There’s a fair amount of experience out there among white voters now, and that has lessened the fears about black candidates.”

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Shahn Majid

Rowan W. Hamilton

Some of Fields medalist Alain Connes‘ revolutionary ideas shed light on how to understand the ‘zoo’ of elementary particles thrown up by accelerators like the LHC. If Connes is right, the key to the fundamental nature of matter lies in graffiti carved on a bridge in Dublin in 1843.

The graffiti was carved by this man William Rowan Hamilton on Brougham bridge as the ebullient mathematician was passing on a walk with his wife. According to a plaque there, it read:

I am in Dublin later this week and will be taking my camera.

So how does this answer the mysteries of the Universe? According to Alain Connes in his chapter of the multiauthored volume On Space and Time, spacetime indeed has ‘extra dimensions’ but these extra dimensions are not those of any usual kind geometry (curled up or whatever as in string theory) but something far more imaginative; they are given mainly by a symbolic algebra defined by this graffiti.

Connes is a Fields medalist, which is like a Nobel Prize for mathematicians (who were left out in the will of Alfred Nobel. Incidentally, there is no merit to the popular myth that this was because of an affair between his wife and a mathematician; he never married). So what that means is that the actual mathematics behind his theory is very deep and very advanced; I’ll only be touching on the easier parts in this post.

Well, lets get the maths over with. The main idea we need is that geometry is algebra.

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