A Mathematically-Optimised Party!

When throwing a great party, it's important to provide goodies that all of the guests will enjoy. If you know all of the guests and their tastes, then it's pretty easy to tailor your offerings accordingly. But throwing a larger party presents a fun challenge in terms of making sure there's at least a little something good for everyone.

Since I'm trained as a mathematician and tend to throw parties for mathematicians, naturally I can't help but approach this challenge in a mathematical way.

Specifically, I set out to throw a party in which half of the finger-foods have dairy and half don't, half of the finger-foods have meat and half don't, and half of the finger-foods have gluten and half don't. Thus I prepared 2 x 2 x 2 = 8 different recipes!

Starting from the recipe with none of the above, let's review all of the options I prepared:

Tortilla Chips and Guacamole

❌ Gluten, ❌ Dairy, ❌ Meat

This is a perennial favorite and quite easy to make.

Sometimes I make guacamole from scratch, but for this party -- since I was preparing so many items -- I didn't want to deal with the additional cleanup of the food processor, so I just bought some guacamole and mixed it with salsa, plus some hot peppers from the garden for one of the portions of dip.

Bruschetta Toasts with Balsamic Vinegar Pearls

 ✅ Gluten, ❌ Dairy, ❌ Meat

Again I went the lazy route and bought the bruschetta in a jar. Since it can be prepared in advance, I could have prepared it myself -- and maybe I should have since I ended up not having quite as much as I wanted. The toasts should generally have a bit more bruschetta on them than you see in this picture.

All you need is some leftover bread (baguette works especially well). Wait until your guests arrive before toasting it because the toasts with bruschetta on them can get soggy fairly quickly -- but they're quite delicious right when they're prepared.

(Toast the bread slices by themselves and add the bruschetta and garnish after toasting.)

I've found that balsamic vinegar pearls are a nice garnish for bruschetta toast. They're a good compliment in terms of flavor as well as color and texture.

My apologies in advance to all of my vegan friends for the rest of this article... you can stop reading now. 😀

Caprese Bites

❌ Gluten, ✅ Dairy, ❌ Meat

This is one of those finger-foods that I would call "canonical" -- it's such a standard, obvious, perfect combination that it's generally pictured on the package of the mozzarella balls. (Indeed, I'm not sure that mozzarella balls the size of cherry tomatoes exist for any other purpose.)

Caprese bites are delicious, easy-to-make, and can be made early in the day (so they're not taking up that precious hour just before the guests arrive).

Just get a bunch of cherry tomatoes and an equal amount of mozzarella balls. Wash the cherry tomatoes and slice them all in half and add salt and olive oil. Then slice all of the mozzarella balls in half, and pair each one with a half-tomato -- placing a fresh basil leaf in between -- and attach them with a toothpick.

Sashimi Crunch

❌ Gluten, ❌ Dairy, ✅ Meat

This is a recipe I invented myself.

Basically, I like sushi, I like sushi flavors, and I like making sushi for dinner parties. The problem is that getting the rice just right is a time-critical operation, and I don't want to deal with that while trying to coordinate the scheduling of all of the other food preparation.

My solution? Skip the rice.

So it's not actually "sushi", but the preparation of this dish is very similar to preparing maki.

I happen to have a number of these little ceramic/earthenware bowls (?) that some French cheeses are sold in, and I figured I could use them for finger-foods.

The ingredients you need to make 8 of these are the following:

1 long cucumber

~ 120 grams smoked salmon, sliced thin

Sushi nori sheets (about 2 or 3)

Soy sauce

Wasabi

It is very important that the cucumber remain as fresh and crisp as possible, so this recipe should be one of the last things you prepare before the guests arrive.

Peel the cucumber and cut it in half, and cut each half into four sticks:

Then carefully divide the smoked salmon into either 16 or 24 thin strips:

I sliced it into 24 strips in this case because the slices of salmon I bought were fairly small, so I couldn't make 16 long ones, just 24 short ones.

Note that it's OK to kind of piece together some partial pieces -- they don't really need to be perfect.

Then, if you're a mathematician following along, you can probably guess that we'll be adding 3 pieces of salmon to each of the 8 cucumber sticks.

Prepare a bowl of water so that you can get the nori wet with your fingers to make it sticky (as you would do for making maki).

Slice three strips of nori and place them (shiny side down) on the first three strips of salmon in such a way that the bottom of each nori strip aligns with the bottom of each salmon strip, and the top extends beyond the salmon:

Then get the nori a bit wet with your fingers and place a stick of cucumber across the top ends of the three strips and roll the three strips of nori (along with the salmon) onto the cucumber.

Note that it is very important for the nori to be sliced like this so that each cucumber stick has 2 or 3 separate bands of nori/salmon on it. This is because it is impossible to bite through the nori. The objective is to allow the guest to dip the cucumber in the soy sauce & wasabi and eat it in multiple bites. The bites of nori need to be separate for this to work.

Once you have prepared all 8 cucumber sticks in the same way, you can put them in the fridge for a little while -- just be sure to separate them from each other using cellophane or equivalent.

I generally mix some soy sauce with wasabi in advance of the party so that it is very easy to assemble these appetizers just before the first guests arrive. Just pour a bit of soy sauce & wasabi in each bowl and place the cucumber stick across the small bowl as pictured above.

These have gotten rave reviews, which makes up for the fact that they're a little more labor intensive that some of the other items in this collection.

Of course if you would like to spend more effort on a different finger-food and you'd like something super simple for the "meat-but-no-dairy-or-gluten" category, the "canonical" choice is, naturally, prosciutto e melone:

I did not actually make this for the same party as all of the other recipes, and I assume I don't need to explain how it's done since it's pretty self-explanatory. 

Filled Mini-Pastetlis

✅ Gluten, ✅ Dairy, ❌ Meat

These little pastetlis can be purchased pre-made. Then, when the guests arrive, you just need to warm them briefly in the oven and fill them.

There are tons of different options for fillings. Typically one would use a soft cheese as a base (gorgonzola, mascarpone, or ricotta) and maybe add another food to stuff them with such as a half walnut (the suggestion on the package), or something like I've done here, stuffing some with artichoke hearts and others with stuffed olives.

I feel like this was probably the least-successful item I made for this party because I didn't really test and come up with a good flavor combination in advance. So I used mascarpone mixed with garden herbs (especially sage) and then the stuffing items you see above. This flavor combination did not work.

First of all, I found ricotta was better than mascarpone with the olives & artichokes, and the sage was just really wrong, so it's better to leave it out entirely. But when using ricotta alone with the olives and artichokes, they result is too bland. Maybe mixing the ricotta with a bit of tomato paste and chopped basil would be better...? Anyway there are a lot of possibilities, so this dish is still a work-in-progress.

Salami & Sbrinz

❌ Gluten, ✅ Dairy, ✅ Meat

This is another "canonical" one: It's really easy to make because the flavors of a couple of simple ingredients complement each other so perfectly.

Basically just get a whole Salami Milano and cut it into cubes, and get a block of Sbrinz and cut it into cubes of about the same size as the salami cubes. Then stick them together, two to a toothpick.

I always put the salami cube on top because Sbrinz is a hard, crumbly cheese, which will crack in half if you try to stick a toothpick all the way through it.

You can potentially use a different cheese -- indeed, a less-crumbly one might be easier to work with -- but I think for the flavor combination you can't beat Sbrinz.

Tortilla roll-ups

✅ Gluten, ❌ Dairy, ✅ Meat

These are quite easy to make, they can be made a bit in advance (earlier in the day), and they are surprisingly tasty.

Basically, I just take some soft, wheat tortillas and spread each one with some sauce. I found that (Thomy) Truffle dip works really well for this recipe, but there are lots of other possible sauces or condiments that would work as well.

Then, on each one, I put two slices of prosciutto across the middle and place some fresh lettuce.

Ideally the lettuce should be crispy and crinkly. For this party, I used lettuce that I grew in my garden.

After placing the lettuce, fold one flap over the lettuce, but don't align the two edges (otherwise the inner lip will extend beyond the outer one when you roll it).

Then roll it into a somewhat-tight roll starting from the fold. Once it is rolled, insert 4 toothpicks to hold it closed, and slice it into 4 sections, as pictured above.

For presentation, naturally, it's nicest to stand up the segments on the plate:

For the final category -- the one that combines all three restricted items -- I used a very unusual and imaginative recipe that I got from the Betty Bossi "Apéro & Fingerfood" cookbook, p. 20:

Cervelat-Tortellini-Spiessli

✅ Gluten, ✅ Dairy, ✅ Meat

 

This picture is from the preparation stage. The picture after it's cooked is below.

Here's how you make it:

Get a pack of 2 cervelats. If you do not have cervelat in your country, you might be able to substitute bratwurst or some other sausage, but I doubt it will be as good.

Peel the casing off the cervelats. In the picture in the cookbook they actually look like they're not peeled (though the instructions say to do it), but if you don't peel them, this snack is very difficult to eat (I made this mistake the first time I made this).

Take a package of fresh tortellini. In this party I used the recipe's recommended tortellini (filled with spinach and ricotta) -- which worked very well in terms of flavor combination. The cookbook seems to imply that other fresh pasta could be used in place of tortellini, but I tried it with ravioli, and the edges burned. Use tortellini.

Take 100 grams of Gruyère or Emmentaler and cut it into cubes, and slice the cervelats into rounds. The objective is to have essentially equal numbers of cheese cubes, tortellinis, and cervelat slices so that they can be stacked and attached (with a toothpick) as shown in the above image.

These can be prepared early in the day and stored in the fridge, and then they can be cooked after the guests arrive. Add some paprika and olive oil to each one and cook them for about 10 minutes in a 180C oven.

I unfortunately didn't get a good picture of these after they were cooked -- I guess I was busy throwing a party or something -- so my one photo kind of looks like those "nailed it" images of attempts to make beautiful foods found on Instagram. 😂😂😂

But another problem was that I used a somewhat larger/cheaper bag of tortellini, and most of the tortellini were kind of misshapen and didn't sit nicely on the cervelat slices.

The next time I make this recipe, I'll make sure to get the highest-quality fresh tortellini.

And I will definitely make it again, because this always gets lots of compliments. It's very rich, though, so be sure to serve lighter fare alongside it, as I've done in this mathematically-optimised collection!

And I'll close with a couple of pictures of my garden (before I harvested the lettuce and basil and sage and mint (for the Hugos)), plus a photo of preparing for the party:

As you might have guessed, the party was a big success, and we'll be sure to be throwing more soon!!

Fun at Camp Quest Switzerland!!

So, how was Camp Quest? you ask.

It was a fantastic experience, and I'm really glad my kids and I participated!

If you haven't heard of it, Camp Quest is an organization of secular summer camps -- mostly in the US, but also in the UK and (luckily for me!) here in Switzerland. But before I get into the pictures and what we did there, I would like to explain a bit about why I wanted to participate in this.

As a kid, I always liked going to camp. It was great to be out in nature, doing things that were completely different from my usual life. I even liked sharing tents or cabins with a bunch of other girls (with midnight activities like ghost stories and such) despite the fact that I always had difficulty making friends and being accepted as part of the group with other girls. Whether it was with the Girl Scouts, a school camp, or (most frequently) a Mormon church camp, it was a fun adventure!

Now that I no longer believe nor practice Mormonism, I don't have the built-in community that comes with it. The opportunity of passing camp fun along to the next generation as an adult volunteer is one of the things I gave up when I left the church. Probably many of you are thinking, "I hated camp! Not having to got to camp is one of the perks of being an atheist or a none -- not a drawback!" But, as I've said many times, religion and religious organizations fill many roles in people's lives, and it's totally normal that the parts one person loved may be exactly the parts someone else hated, and vice-versa. So if you hated camp, this post isn't about telling you you're wrong, it's about the variety of different experiences we humans enjoy.

In my case, one of the parts of camp that I hated was the pressure to feel "spiritual" emotions and to sit around and express them in some sort of testimony format. As a Mormon kid, I spent a lot of time trying to psyche myself into liking testimony meetings (and tried desperately to gain a testimony -- this stuff is really important for Mormons), but I was really fighting my built-in reaction that this stuff is really, really creepy and weird. I know a lot of people sincerely like that sort of thing (including people who don't believe in the supernatural), but for me personally, a big perk of Camp Quest was no testimony meeting. Nothing even remotely resembling it.

A lot of people in the non-believer community feel that we shouldn't be doing things to ape religion (like make our own summer camps). And if Camp Quest really isn't about trying to indoctrinate kids to being atheists (i.e. some sort of equal-and-opposite of Jesus Camp), then why bother having a specifically "secular" camp, as opposed to just sending your kids to some sort of generic science camp or something...?

In response, I would say that religion didn't invent summer camp. Summer camp does not inherently have anything to do with ideology, but it's normal to have a variety of camps focused on different themes. Camp Quest Switzerland in 2014 included lots of fun workshops in science, mathematics, and skepticism, but it was not about sitting around telling the kids what to believe or patting ourselves on the back for our shared ideology. In fact, there was another mom who had come along to volunteer as well who is a theist. She doesn't participate in organized religion (she's from a Catholic background, and her husband was from a Muslim background), but she's raising her kids to believe in God. And there's no reason for that to be a problem in this environment.

But why not just a generic science or other camp? Why something that has any ideological connection?

Well, I actually want to be part of a community. I volunteer at my kids' school, I participate in neighborhood events, and I think there's something to be said for participating in local groups with people you share ideas and interests with as well. (My husband and I are planning to join the Zürich Freethinkers as soon as I figure out how to work the website.) For the past few years, we've been sending the kids to Vacances Edcuatives in France during the February vacations (mostly because we don't want our kids to be the only ones in their class who don't ski, yet we don't want to bother to go skiing ourselves), and that has been a good experience -- but it's not the same as participating in a camp that is connected with a real community that you can be a part of.

Now, after all that intro, here's what we did!!

First of all, the location was gorgeous, up in the mountains!

Normally I like to enjoy Switzerland's beautiful mountains from somewhere down on the ground looking up at them. Actually going up into the mountains, riding along on those tiny, winding roads where one slip of the driver's hand could send you falling to your doom -- well, it's the sort of trip that I love in retrospect, after I'm back on the ground alive, like now. And this trip was no exception. 

But seriously, it was very cool to spend a week in a tiny village on the side of a mountain with a beautiful view of the valley and the mountains and mountain villages on the other side. And it was awesome to celebrate the Swiss national holiday (August first) in real Swiss style!

For much of the week, the kids participated in activities offered by the local tourism industry: workshops on making bread and cheese, a hike to a cabin where a local storyteller told us some folk tales in dialect (which I didn't understand at all, BTW, but it was interesting), and a nature hike/treasure hunt.

Plus the adult leaders of Camp Quest offered a series of workshops at the chalet where we were staying. In science and nature, we had an activity learning about the local plants, plus some physics experiments such as making a pickle glow by running electricity through it, and a hands-on biology lab dissecting the heart and lungs of a pig.

There was also an improv theater workshop that my son Léo really enjoyed, and two skepticism-themed workshops: one on illusions and one on homeopathy where the kids got to make their own homeopathic remedies. Note that the kids weren't fed any conclusions about homeopathy -- they simply got to see what it really is, and they were left to draw their own conclusions.

My workshop was a mathematics workshop on tiling the plane. For it, I made about a million Penrose Tiles for the kids to play with:

The Penrose Tiles were fun, but even after having done a few recreational math workshops at my kids' school and now this, I still think my presentation style need work. But it gets a bit better with each experience!

All in all a fun experience -- I hope to send my kids again next year!

A problem with the two-body problem

Does everybody know what the two-body problem is?

In a nutshell, it's this: If you're a professor (or would like to be), you generally have only a handful of appropriate job options, and they're scattered around the world. To advanace your career, it's best to be willing to move to wherever the job is. But then -- what happens if two professors are married to each other?

The field I'm most familiar with is Mathematics. As you may know, I have a Ph.D. in Math, but immediately after earning it, I switched my career path to software engineering. However, socially I've stayed in contact with mathematicians around the world -- playing hostess and attending receptions and dinners as a professor's wife. From this vantage point, I've observed a strange dynamic about the two-body problem.

The first thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot more men than women in mathematics. Most of the highest-level hotshot researchers are men. Why that may be -- and how/whether it can be changed -- is beyond the scope of this discussion; I'm merely stating the current situation. Also note that Mathematicians often meet (and later marry) other Mathematicians (see the mating game).

When a university wants to recruit a particular professor, arranging a position for the professor's spouse is often a necessary part of the recruitment package. Otherwise moving to the new job might mean that one spouse would have to drop out of academic research, which is out of the question for many couples.

Then the problem is this: Sometimes women -- women who are perfectly capable of getting a research job on their own merits -- end up taking jobs where they're perceived as "affirmative action cases" by their colleagues. In other words, they may be surrounded by colleagues who are thinking "You're not quite on the same level as the rest of us -- you're just here at super-prestigious-U because the university wanted him."

Now, I'm at enough of a distance from the whole situation that readers may rightly accuse me of not knowing what I'm talking about. However, I've heard too many stories at parties, etc., (from people around the world) where the wife is talking about how they were recruited by university X, and throws in "Of course, they were really interested in recruiting him."

In some cases, it can certainly happen that the wife is the one the university is most interested in. Or the wonderful situation where the university really wants to recruit them both. But, ultimately, I think the perception is a bigger problem than the reality. Regardless of the reality, if your colleagues perceive you as "less competent", it affects your opportunities for advancement, and it affects the dynamic when doing research as part of a group. As objective as Mathematics can be, people aren't immune to having their perceptions and conclusions colored by prejudice.

At least it looks like a potential problem to me. Anyone have any more experience with this situation?

This is me...

I've posted a lot of naughty things on this blog, and I'll probably post more, so I just thought that for balance I should post some photos to demonstrate how wholesome I really am!!!

Here's a photo of me as a BYU student. See if you can find me in this picture:


Here I am as a grad student:


Here I've finally graduated, with that Ph.D. in hand!!! Woo-Hoo!!! :D


My mom earned her master's degree in journalism at the same time, and we got some great photos of the two of us as graduates together!!! She's LDS though, so I'm not sure she wants me posting photos of her on this blog, as if she endorses it or something... (She's even hotter than I am, by the way... ;-) )

Here's a picture from my wedding reception:


A little later in the evening:


Same couple, ten months later:


(Yeah, I know, we were embarrassingly conventional on the timing of that first kid, but what can you do?)

A creation myth by Nicolas

My four-year-old son Nicolas was telling me about sharks the other day, and when I said something about sharks living in water, he said "No, sharks don't live in water, they live in the sea."

me: But the sea is made of water, right?

Nico: (after thinking about it a bit) Yes... There was a great big water bottle, and it spilled on the sand and made the sea!

So there you have it. And that's why the sea is made of water. ;^)

Okay, one more cute kid story:

My little Nico usually only speaks to me in English, but every now and then he'll learn something at school or from his French grandma and not know the corresponding words in English to talk about it. When that happens, and Nico wants to tell me about something he can only describe in French, he switches the language of the conversation as follows:

Nico: Maman ? (French for Mommy)

me: Yes?

Nico: Non, tu dis "Oui". [No, you say "Oui".]

me: Oui ?

Then he launches into his story in French.

(He's curious to know how to say the same thing in English, so I generally translate the things he tells me into English for him.)

Okay, one last one:

Recently Nico wanted a particular toy that was at a toystore on the other side of town. So we walked over there, and on the way back, when we were almost home, Nicolas started getting tired. He then made the following observation:

"If the store is far away from home, that means home is far away from the store."

The kid's a genius -- already formulating his own reciprocity theorems!! He's sure to be a great Mathematician one day!!! :D

Celtic Knotwork

One of the many random hobbies I took up in grad school was drawing Celtic knotwork.



(I was reminded of this recently by Sideon's stained glass adventures.)

I used to joke around with my friends that this is the perfect hobby for me because it's Celtic and it's not work.

Hehe!! I'm such a jokemeister!!!

Maybe if I'd spent more time in grad school doing math rather than joke-smithing, learning French, and otherwise goofing off I'd be a Mathematician today rather than a code monkey... Ah, well, no sense worrying about it now...

Actually Celtic knotwork is naturally interesting to Mathematicians because there's something of a mathematical component to the knots.



At the time I picked up a book by a Mathematician giving an algorithm for how to draw Celtic knotwork based on mathematical principles:



I wasn't terribly pleased with the results I obtained with this algorithm. They were Mathematically correct but not aesthetically correct in that they tended to fill the space in a rather even and random manner.

So I went back to my earlier technique of just winging it...

The Mating Game: A primatologist looks at the mathematical community

Are you like me? Do you love reading those books by Jane Goodall and Frans De Waal where they observe a community of great apes and describe all of their social interactions in graphic detail?

If so, you're in luck! Because I have observed a primate society myself (in their natural habitat!), and today I am going to share my observations with you!!!


Alpha males

Many people do not realize that the mathematical community has alpha males. Outsiders often think that mathematicians are all more or less equally dorky and socially maladjusted. To outsiders, perhaps they are! But not within their own society.

Everyone within the community knows who the most brilliant world-famous researchers are. Outwardly everyone generally treats everyone else in a friendly and egalitarian manner, from the genius Fields Medalist down to the lowliest first-year grad student. Yet the rest of the community will defer to the top dogs in subtle ways merely by virtue of the esteem and awe their brilliance inspires.

(Note: There are also females in this category, but they are more rare and hence less well-understood by the primatologist.)


Establishing dominance

The principal manner of establishing dominance is by proving an important theorem and publishing it. It is particularly highly regarded to solve a famous problem, prove a long-standing conjecture, or win a prize such as a Fields Medal. However, dominance is also often established and expressed at lectures in seminars or conferences.

Dominance is established in a lecture by asking the speaker lots of relevant and insightful questions. Math research lectures are notoriously deep and complex even for good mathematicians! If you ask relevant and insightful questions about the lecture, it shows that you are following it well enough in real time to be one step ahead of the lecturer. This will impress everyone in the audience.

Asking questions throughout the lecture is also a means of demonstrating your importance. An alpha-male world-famous researcher will sometimes sit in the front row and talk to the speaker as if the lecture were a personal conversation between himself and the speaker, despite an entire lecture hall full of less important people. I've even seen one guy put his feet up on the podium while chatting with the speaker!

Only people who are very confident of their top-dog status would dare (and be permitted) to do this.


Gossip

Mathematicians love to gossip! They particularly love to gossip about famous mathematicians. At almost any dinner or party for mathematicians, once they're done discussing the technical precisions of this or that theory, they start gossiping.

The main purpose of this appears to be an excuse for name-dropping -- i.e., you wouldn't know a bunch of random details about so-and-so's personal life unless you know him personally, and perhaps you are brilliant enough yourself to be doing a research project with him. In the mathematical community, if otherwise serious and reserved grown men are spreading a bunch of questionable stories about you behind your back, then you know you've really made it!


Male sexuality

A top researcher who is world-famous in his field will have plenty of opportunity for sex with female grad students and post-docs. How the researcher responds to these opportunities is a question of temperament. Like many humans, some will choose to be monogamous anyway. Others take up these opportunities. Some researchers who are famous for their mathematical results also have a reputation for sexual conquests. Hard to believe, but there exist humans who -- to the untrained eye -- look like ordinary boring professors, but in their own society are alpha-male casanovas!!

Outside of the top echelons, however, sexual opportunities within the community drop off rapidly for males because of the scarcity of females. Mid-tier (respected but not awe-inspiring) males often succeed in attracting another mathematician as a mate. Below that level, males are typically obligated to look outside the community for mates. This is less desirable because it requires engaging in non-math-related social activities.

Juvenile males (undergraduate and younger) are often sequestered in a math and science curriculum where they have limited access to females. Many of them have no sexual opportunities at all.


Female sexuality

Because the supply/demand ratio is in their favor, female mathematicians have their pick of mates at every level. One common result of this is a complete gender-role reversal of the typical human mating strategies.

In ordinary human society, the female is commonly more interested in establishing a monogamous relationship while the male is more interested in having sex with multiple partners. This is often reversed in the mathematical community because the males have so few sexual opportunities that they logically attempt to hold onto those opportunities that arise, whereas the females have so much opportunity that they are hesitant to commit too quickly.

Some females deliberately seek out the most famous researchers just for the status that comes from seducing someone who is held in such esteem by the community.


Conclusion

A mathematician is a shy and often misunderstood creature. Yet careful observation shows him to have similar social habits to those of other primates.


Published in the Utah Valley Monitor October 27, 2005.