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Another Extraordinary Person

The floor of some of the main buildings of University College Dublin--I cannot speak for them all--has a very convenient colour system embedded in it. There are five or six lines that go to different places, and an individual who wants to find their way around simply picks their main colour line, follows it, and then branches off into the subdivisions. It makes the very sixties formalism and anonymity of the corridors liveable, and I rather liked it when I was there for a few days some weeks ago.

So I was pleased to read this morning of a brilliant Russian-Jewish former security guard and labourer in Israel who has solved the mystery of the 'coloured road', a mathematical problem which has defied the wits of many.

The mystery is of how to divine instructions for directions that would be foolproof and which could be read backward, so that any piece of information sent along a path could be directed to a destination or tracked from whence it came even if there were no signposts along the path and multiple routes along which one could go wrong, and even if one did not know where it started from within a network.

This sort of thing is important and technology that arises from it can rapidly become ubiquitous. Look at how Huffman codes made digital telephones possible, for instance, or jpeg images of the sort that adorn many blogs.

The problem has lasted for 38 years, and Avraham Trakhtman has solved it. Well done sir! Now, write to the London Underground authorities, care of a high building somewhere above a hole in the ground and tell them to teach their managers how to apply the insight to getting tubes to run on time and properly!

Here, for no good reason, is Sinead O'Connor singing 'Streets of London', which was sung on a coach full of working people whom my family and I went on a trip to malta with when I was little. You can't accuse this blog of not making cognitive associations, however demented you may think that you can prove me. The streets of London do not, I might point out, have any colour coding or sense of overall design to them at all, which I love.

The picture at the top of this blog is of Lady Lovelace, the brilliant, doomed founder of scientific computing, analyst of Babbage's machine, and daughter of Lord Byron.

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