Now I’m back to my former life as a math professor at the University of California. I’ll be going back to the Centre for Quantum Technology next summer, and summers after that, too. But life feels different now: a 2-year period of no teaching allowed me to change my research direction, but now it’s time to teach people what I’ve learned!
It also happens to be a time when the Azimuth Project is about to do a lot of interesting things. So, let me tell you some news!
The Azimuth Project has a bunch of new members, who are bringing with them new expertise and lots of energy. One of them is David Tanzer, who was an undergraduate math major at U. Penn, and got a Ph.D. in computer science at NYU. Now he’s a software developer, and he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
He writes:
My areas of interest include:
• Queryable encyclopedias
• Machine representation of scientific theories
• Machine representation of conflicts between contending theories
• Social and technical structures to support group problem-solving activities
• Balkan music, Afro-Latin rhythms, and jazz guitar
To me, the most meaningful applications of science are to the myriad of problems that beset the human race. So the Aziumuth Project is a good focal point for me.
And on Azimuth, he’s starting to write some articles on ‘programming with Petri nets’. We’ve talked about them a lot in the network theory series:
They’re a very general modelling tool in chemistry, biology and computer science, precisely the sort of tool we need for a deep understanding of the complex systems that keep our living planet going—though, let’s be perfectly clear about this, just one of many such tools, and one of the simplest. But as mathematical physicists, Jacob Biamonte and I have studied Petri nets in a highly theoretical way, somewhat neglecting the all-important problem of how you write programs that simulate Petri nets!
Such programs are commercially available, but it’s good to see how to write them yourself, and that’s what David Tanzer will tell us. He’ll use the language Python to write these programs in a nice modern object-oriented way. So, if you like coding, this is where the rubber meets the road.
I’m no expert on programming, but it seems the modularity of Python code nicely matches the modularity of Petri nets. This is something I’d like to get into more deeply someday, in my own effete theoretical way. I think the category-theoretic foundations of computer languages like Python are worth understanding, perhaps more interesting in fact than purely functional languages like Haskell, which are better understood. And I think they’ll turn out to be nicely related to the category-theoretic foundations of Petri nets and other networks I’m going to tell you about!
And I believe this will be important if we want to develop ‘ecotechnology’, where our machines and even our programming methodologies borrow ingenuity and wisdom from biological processes… and learn to blend with nature instead of fighting it.
Another new member of the Azimuth Project is Ken Webb. He has a BA in Cognitive Science from Carleton University in Ottawa, and an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems from The University of Sussex in Brighton. Since then he’s worked for many years as a software developer and consultant, using many different languages and approaches.
He writes:
Things that I’m interested in include:
• networks of all types, hierarchical organization of network nodes, and practical applications
• climate change, and “saving the planet”
• programming code that anyone can run in their browser, and that anyone can edit and extend in their browser
• approaches to software development that allow independently-developed apps to work together
• the relationship between computer-science object-oriented (OO) concepts and math concepts
• how everything is connected
I’ve been paying attention to the Azimuth Project because it parallels my own interests, but with a more math focus (math is not one of my strong points). As learning exercises, I’ve reimplemented a few of the applications mentioned on Azimuth pages. Some of my online workbooks (blog-like entries that are my way of taking active notes) were based on content at the Azimuth Project.
He’s started building a Petri net modeling and simulation tool called Xholon. It’s written in Java and can be run online using Java Web Start (JNLP). Using this tool you can completely specify Petri net models using XML. You can see more details, and examples, on his Azimuth page. If I were smarter, or had more spare time, I would have already figured out how to include examples that actually run in an interactive way in blog articles here! But more on that later.
Soon I hope Ken will finish a blog entry in which he discusses how Petri nets fit into a bigger setup that can also describe ‘containers’, where molecules are held in ‘membranes’ and these membranes can allow chosen molecules through, and also split or merge—more like biology than inorganic chemistry. His outline is very ambitious:
This tutorial works through one simple example to demonstrate the commonality/continuity between a large number of different ways that people use to understand the structure and behavior of the world around us. These include chemical reaction networks, Petri nets, differential equations, agent-based modeling, mind maps, membrane computing, Unified Modeling Language, Systems Biology Markup Language, and Systems Biology Graphical Notation. The intended audience includes scientists, engineers, programmers, and other technically literate nonexperts. No math knowledge is required.
With help from Glyn Adgie and Allan Erskine, Jim Stuttard has been setting up a server for Azimuth. All these folks are programmers, and Jim Stuttard, in particular, was a systems consultant and software applications programmer in C, C++ and Java until 2001. But he’s really interested in formal methods, and now he programs in Haskell.
I won’t say anything about the Azimuth server, since I’ll get it wrong, it’s not quite ready yet, and Jim wisely prefers to get it working a bit more before he talks about it. But you can get a feeling for what’s coming by going here.
You can follow what we’re doing by visiting the Azimuth Forum. Most of our conversations there are open to the world, but some can only be seen if you become a member. This is easy to do, except for one little thing.
Nobody, nobody 
, seems capable of reading the directions where I say, in boldface for easy visibility:
Use your whole real name as username. Spaces and capital letters are good. So, for example, a username like ‘Tim van Beek’ is good, ‘timvanbeek’ not so good, and ‘Tim’ or ‘tvb’ won’t be allowed.
The main point is that we want people involved with the Azimuth Project to have clear identities. The second, more minor point is that our software is not braindead, so you can choose a username that’s your actual name, like
instead of having to choose something silly like
or
But never mind me: I’m just a crotchety old curmudgeon. Come join the fun and help us save the planet by developing software that explains climate science, biology, and ecology—and, just maybe, speeds up the development of green mathematics and ecotechnology!
