Tim Poston - Keynote: Data Comes in Shapes

I feel very honored to be invited here.

Thank you very much.

I like to, I think I've seen one

maybe two other people with gray hair here

[audience laughter]

The last talk I gave a few weeks ago

was to a meeting of ophthalmologists

and that was a bunch of

but all the people, okay, and

a homage here to the Fifth Elephant

This is the novel, the cover of the novel

from which it was taken and, well actually

I'm using this as a connection for a

little bit of boasting because

Terry Pratchett wrote the book

I am a co-author of a co-author of
Terry Pratchett

and I actually signed a publisher contract

on my 70th birthday

a few weeks ago to publish a science

fiction novel with Ian Stewart

and I mention that not just as boasting, but

ok, this is a Data Geeks meeting rather

than the Graphics Geeks meeting, but if

anybody has graphics enthusiasm, there is

all kinds of stuff that would be fun

to build for the website we are putting

together for that novel, strange things

happening on that planet, so do make

contact if you're interested in drawing

strange and beautiful things because

I have some strange and beautiful things

to draw and some to interact with

What I don't have is a budget

You have to just like it

ok, that is pure digression

I was originally a mathematician and

that was my PhD back before almost anbody

here was born, and I've kinda wandered

around the world and the sciences and

I'm turning into some sort of an engineer

But what I'm going to talk about here is

the power of particular mathematical

point of view, which is that numbers are

not just numbers

They belong together in shapes, so

What are data?

Mostly, they're numbers

I know there are fields and things

We've been hearing about that, but

then you keep counting

Lots and lots of it is numbers

But are numbers only numbers?

Well, no they gather together in things

They come in patterns

and really big data is all about

the arrangements those things make

just knowing the numbers, you don't
know anything

You got to know how they fit together

Patterns are shapes

So, studying shapes, data shapes,
any kind of shapes

Space, time shapes, right? Geometry

But not the kind I was doing when I
was 13 or 14 years old

Mind you, I had some taste for it and it
was quite fun

but it was all flat in the sand,
just like that

and here is Euclid

Stuff we would write in little triangles

and fun things

This I remember as a remarkable theorem,

but I have never ever, ever, ever
seen a use for

(audience laughs)

It's weird, it's very much something

about the plane, it's strange

and I have never encountered it or

referred to it in anything useful since I
left school

It's a bizarre theorem,
which is occasionally useful

Everything is so much in the plane

Data shapes don't live mostly in the plane

Geometry doesn't mean that you replace

now this, by the way, is highly superior
pointer technology

Must better than those twinkling little

red things that lose track of where it's
pointing to

and 10% of your audience can't see red

Now, here is something serious

Children think in 3D

They think brilliantly in 3D

They naturally work in 3D

They are connecting how their vision

is working with their hands

they can reach out and grab your nose

If you watch a small child, it's doing
a lot of practice at building

a 3D model of the world, and then

and these days that continues into
primary school

a hundred years ago, ugh..

but now primary school's good

at secondary school sucks?

It's still, if you get any geometry

it's flat flat stuff

you can get more and more complicated

yeah.. but,