How did the problem and the solution find one another?

From the MET point of view, the Chudnovsky brothers represent a “solution” so remote it might as well be one of those green glass Japanese fishing floats bobbing happily off the coast of Peru. From the Chudnovsky point of view, the MET problem is quite literally locked away in a vault buried within an institution and a profession the brothers do not understand and may not actually know about. The Unicorn tapestry photos might as well have been on Mars. (This is an asymmetrical remoteness because, presumably, museums find mathematicians more easily than mathematicians find museums.)

That problem and solution found one another is a miracle. Our job is to see if there were mechanics in the miracle, and what, if anything, these can teach us about networks in expanding cultural spaces.

The first question, of course, is whether the Chudnovsky-MET connection has anything to do with the real world. Some will say the Unicorn photo problem is the sort of thing that happens to museums, and nobody else. Surely, the brothers Chudnovsky are the very definition of an arcane solution. Maybe. But not if we proceed metaphorically.

I think it must be true that problems in the world are speciating as fast as everything else in our culture. When we decide to “reinvent” some part of our world, to express our creativity, to think “outside the box,” we often force ourselves to move out of the standard package of solutions to something that must be custom build, perhaps even purpose built (few, if any, modular components).

In the old Vegas, entertainment called for little more than a conventional stage, a half decent sound system, and some way of keeping middle-aged women from practicing Dionysian abandon at Wayne’s expense. The advent of Circe du Soleil changed all that. Now it is customary to make people sail through water and air in a single arc. For the old Vegas, the number of people capable of solving the staging “problem” could be counted in the hundreds of thousands. For Circe, it’s down to a handful. God knows how they find them. (Chances are, they train them instead, perhaps from infancy.)

I think this might also be true for the corporation. There was time when CEOs were either patrician or hard charging. (Morgan Stanley, before and after.) And there was plenty enough of either one. Now that the corporate world is a place of new complexity, the number of suitable candidates has fallen. It is not clear that the MBA conduit remains the best recruiting system and it looks as if the old supply chains are failing us. In-house training may be the solution here. (And this is a very interesting recipe for plenitude. Some theory of the corporation says that managers are supposed to be interchangeable and that when they do trade places, the intelligence of the system distributes itself and becomes more uniform. But if we are looking at a world in which corporations are so complicated that they can only be run by creatures raised from within, creatures who do not and cannot move across corporations, this will encourage still more different corporate cultures.)

My point (and I do have one): as the world becomes more various, problems and their solutions are perhaps becoming more various too. If the old supply chains are failing us, this opens the vista of a culture in which problems and solutions are ever harder to connect.

Oh, for crying out loud, I’ve done it again. Banged out 700 words and not yet supplied the answer to the question in question. My conclusion, and I do have one, tomorrow. Sorry!

Observed: an unlikely solution finds an improbable solution

Proposed: that we can give an account of the network that connects them

Yesterday: the transition from stage 1 to stage 2

Today: stages 2 through 5

The transition from stage 2 to stage 3 is pretty clear cut. Real estate magnates read The New Yorker and they know an investment opportunity when they see one.

The magnate put up $400,000 to fund the Chudnovsky brothers. In return, he got at least at least one mention in The New Yorker, a philanthropic project that differentiated him from other real estate magnets (of whom there are, I believe, several in NYC), elevated standing in the social world of NYC, a claim to “getting” and supporting what is peculiarly New York about New York. (I am making assumptions about the magnate’s motives. I apologize if these are unfounded, diminishing or unduly Machiavellian. ((Hey, if you want a rosy view of human nature, stay away from the dismal sciences.))

In sum, the magnate converted $400,000 into a pretty substantial body of social and cultural capital. We can’t do this calculation precisely. But there is a PR expert somewhere who could assess the ROI with a fair degree of accuracy. (How else do PR firms decide what to charge?) At the very least, the investment brought him: more profile, more invitations, broader social access, higher social access, and finally a larger business network. This, in turn, gives him access to more and loftier real estate deals. This, in turn, will improve the financial resources with which he can fund subsequent philanthropic “gestures” that the spiral may continue upward.

Many investors pay much more for much less. Museum sponsorship can be much more expensive and receive no reference in the New Yorker or word of mouth treatment. Below, I have included a passage from my new book that describes the more traditional bargain.

Now how does the magnate collect his social and cultural capital? It is not enough to make the philanthropic gift, one must be seen to make the philanthropic gift. Mention in The New Yorker is one way of doing this. Another is showing the Chudnovsky brothers off at a Manhattan soiree. Thus have patrons always harvested the investment. Thus have clients always been obliged to “sing for their supper.” Patrons compete and sometimes trump other patrons when they show off their clients. Patrons impress status non combatants when they show off their clients. Patrons draw in other would-be clients by showing off their clients. Getting the Chudnovsky brothers to show up for a soiree was very good for business. (And it doesn’t matter that their heads are teeming with numbers, racing off in pursuit, say of pi. Really, they just had to turn up.)

In the transition from stage 3 to 4, the ROI soiree model holds with one small difference. When the hedge fund manager shows off the Chudnovsky brothers at his soiree, he is leveraging the magnate’s accomplishment. He is cutting himself in on a piece of the action. For this evening, he too is a patron of the life of the mind. Why is this ok? Why should he help himself to the anthropological consequences of the magnate’s beneficience? It’s ok because he is staging his friend, the magnate’s, generosity. Now the investment is being put to work in the world. It is being lent out. (Is this something the actor understands? Oh, something tells me a hedge fund manager could work it out.)

Little does the fund manager know he plays a much larger role in our network. For he is a MET patron, and this entitles him to cameo appearances from MET curators. Thus does he let the world know of his philanthropy. As it happens, the evening that he invites Chudnovsky brothers, he also invites a curator who happens both to know about the Unicorn problem and to have a wife who is teaches math.

And now we move from stage 4 to stage 5. And wouldn’t we like to have been there when the penny dropped. When asked what they did for a living the Chudnovsky brothers probably said something conversation-stopping like, “oh, we calculate pi.” All eyes glazed over except those of the curator’s wife, who released finally from the tedium of these events, said, “really?” with an intensity of feeling that quite took the brothers aback. And it wasn’t long before the brothers were gazing upon the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries and supplying a solution that was otherwise permanently, structurally, beyond the problem solving powers of even a museum as mighty as the MET.

Geez, this is taking way too long. Tomorrow, then, the thrilling conclusion to the mystery of “networks in expanding cultural spaces.”

Excerpt from Culture and Consumption II

Museums also have had long, intricate relationships with local families of high standing. These families supply precious resources: social authority, cultural capital, and political influence. They have offered their children as curators, their spouses as volunteers, their matriarchs and patriarchs as board members, patrons and donors. They have made the museum a repository of material culture (e.g., china, furniture, art and silver) that has helped define their status in the community (Warner, Low, Lunt and Srole, 1963, p. 107).

The relationship is not asymmetrical. Status flows to these families as it does from them. In the crudest case, the museum will trade social standing for infusions of cash. In effect, it launders wealth so that a “new” family may become (or begin to become) an “old” family. Normally, the exchange is more complicated and more delicate. Museum and family seek a balance in their exchange. There are many currencies in the exchange: money, events, names and naming, objects, prestige, standing, and influence of several varieties. What is given and what is got are calculated with some care. The bargainers seek a rough sense of parity (when an exquisite one is not possible).

Inevitably, there are asymmetries. Some families rank so high they must necessarily give more status to the museum than they get. Others rank sufficiently low they must always get status more than they give. All of this requires careful calculation about what is owned to whom, and someone on staff capable of making them. In a robust status community, the museum is simultaneously a participant in, an arbiter for, a contributor to, and a beneficiary of the process by which status is reckoned and apportioned. (I appreciate that this “exchange” model of the relationship between families and the museum does not always square with the family’s point of view. Many families see their contributions to the museum as “free gifts” offered in the classic tradition of liberality and not because of the consequences that may follow from the act of giving (Kelso 1929).)

Yesterday, we noted how an unlikely solution (two mathematical brothers from Russia) found an improbable problem (distorted Unicorn images at the MET).

Today, I want to use this story to address a question: can expanding networks hope to keep up with the expanding cultural universes in which we live. (All unicorn stories are allegorical and especially this one. The photographic ’tiles” created by the MET proved to have captured diverse materials that would not, when assembled, fit. Gregory Chudnovsky decided finally, “The [MET] tapestry is like water. [It has] no permanent shape.” Water, c’est nous.)

As to the improbability of intersection, we open with a shocker. It is, I think, relatively certain that the Chudnovsky brothers enter this network ONLY because certain conditions were fulfilled. The brothers:

1. were immigrants
2. came in twos (brothers insisting that they represent one functional mathematician)
3. failed to get mainstream academic appointments and lived in obscurity
4. pursued a problem regarded as unsolvable
5. built their own computer and stuffed it into a living room
6. did all of this in New York City

If even one of these conditions were unfulfilled, no New Yorker story, no Rube Goldberg mechanism, no MET solution.

But the moment the world supplies all of these conditions, I think the movement from stage 1 to stage 2 is relatively certain. (And this is strange. One condition missing, no transition. All conditions in place, transition inevitable.)

This is where we are obliged to get “all anthropological.” We are after all talking about cultural systems here, not logical or mechanical ones.

Here’s how I think it works culturally. The Chudnovskys make an irresistible narrative, at least in our culture, in this moment, in New York City. Most people, and virtually every New Yorker, is pleased to hear this story. Most people, and virtually every New Yorker, is still more pleased to tell the story.

Why is this? The story has good narrative value. It gives us sympathetic actors, little guys shut out of the mainstream, who quixotically pursue impossible problems, and do so from the discomfort of an apartment they share with a home made computer. Not just little guys, but deeply eccentric creatures who insist they are a single mathematician who happens to be divided across two bodies. People who have ordinary intellectual gifts love to tell stories about very smart people who are tormented (A Beautiful Mind) or very strange (the Bobby Fischer story). It is, I think, a way of saying, “whew! I may not be all that smart, but at least I’m not nuts.”

For a variety of reasons, then the Chudnovsky story tells well. All of us like to hear stories. It gives pleasure to hear stories. This is almost certainly hardwired and I will say no more. We like even more to tell stories. Telling good stories gives pleasure plus some kind of personal capital. As social actors, we are now more appealing, more credible, perhaps more charismatic. And this is a capital we can spend on a variety of things, some tangible, some not, all of them more or less influential in the disposition of our “life chances.”

Most of all, the Chudnovsky story has “definitional” force. One of the pleasures that listeners take from this story is a confirmation that reads something like: “yes, this is the kind of city I live in. Yes, this is the kind of person I must be (if I live in the kind of city this city is).” Floridians might tell this story with a certain, “get a load of this for just plain nuttiness” and in this case the definitional force runs in the other direction. (”We’re not like this, thank God!”)

But for New Yorkers this story carries a deep confirmation of what the city and its occupants must therefore be. Many other events, institutions, people and misadventures compete to supply alternate notions of the city. The horror of 9-11, Time Square, Donald Trump, crime, any one of these supply a different definition of the essence of the city, to the chagrin or distaste of most New Yorkers. The Chudnovsky story helps define the city these people want to live in and the kind of people they must be, by implication.

This is the place to bring in a “6 degree” analysis. (Thank you, Brian.) Chances are the Chudnovsky story spread quickly. It’s an empirical question: how many links did it take to hit the New Yorker net and how quickly did it then climb the editorial ladder? In this case, the New Yorker Magazine acts as a classic diffusion agent. It is always in the business of making the affairs of the city available to those who cannot experience it first hand. (This is all New Yorkers, because no one can be everywhere on the island, and lots of people across the state, the country, and the world.)

For some of these readers, the New Yorker goes so far as to traffic in a “New York frame of mind” and now the magazine is much more than a classic diffusion agent. It is not just supplying notice of urban affairs but an opportunity to participate as a “New Yorker in absentia.” For this virtual New Yorker, the Chudnovsky story has special definitional force. “Ah, yes, this is confirmation of the very special place this city is…clear evidence of its difference, and how important it is for me to stay in touch.”

Transitions through stages 3, 4, and 5 are much simpler and can be dispatched with a simpler argument. This I leave for tomorrow. Because, like, clients are waiting. I think you see what I am trying to do here. I am trying to see if there is a cultural account of the network that connects the Chudnovsky solution to the MET problem that shows where system, emergent or otherwise, driven by maximizing actors driven by cultural objectives, is operating to link diverse parties in disparate places. This will give us a chance to ask whether networks can keep up with expanding universes.

(I acknowledge the sheer implausibility of my example. Most readers will already have said to themselves, “for crying out loud, there is almost nothing in the Chudnovsky story that corresponds to the real world. Most problems have nothing to do with spoiled digital images at the MET. Most solutions, we must hope, bear no relationship to underemployed mathematicians from Russia!” I hope my final discussion will show that the Chudnovsky story has a certain illustrative value as a talking point.)

In the meantime, I am putting down the chalk and I hope, when I come in tomorrow, someone will have finished the equation.

This is the story of how an unlikely solution, two mathematical brothers from Russia, found an improbable problem, digital images of a Unicorn tapestry. What connects them is a Rube Goldberg mechanism that includes The New Yorker magazine, a real estate magnet, a hedge fund manager, a MET curator and his wife. As we will see, the chances of this particular solution finding this particular problem were astronomically small. Or were they?

The story. Two brothers, born in Kiev, take up residence in New York City, where they lived hand to mouth on the outskirts of the academic world and devote themselves to mathematical problems of great interest but small promise. The brothers Chudnovsky, Gregory and David, built a computer out of mail order parts, installed it in Gregory’s living room and set to the task of calculating pi to two billion decimal places. Twenty-six fans were needed to make Gregory’s apartment habitable in the summer time.

In 1992, The New Yorker wrote an article about the Chudnovsky brothers and their story attracted the attention of Jeffrey H. Lynford, a real estate tycoon. Lynford put up money enough to install the brothers in their own research institute at Polytechnic University where the brothers built a still larger computer.

About 10 years later, the Chudnovsky brothers were attending a party held by Errol Rudman, a hedge-fund manager and a MET patron. Also in attendance was Walter Liedtke, a curator at the MET and his wife, Diana, a math teacher. Walter and Diana wondered whether their fellow guests might not represent a solution to a problem at the MET.

Several years before, the MET had taken digital photographs of a set of tapestries known as “The Hunt of the Unicorn.” (These were woven around 1500 and held for centuries by the La Rochefoucauld family before coming to the US, thanks to a Rockefeller purchase, in 1937.) The tapestries were photographed in 3 x 3 foot sections with the idea that the resulting ’tiles” would be electronically reassembled in a “faithful” image. But the digital record was very large (filling two hundred CDs) and reassembly proved impossible. Eventually, this problem was found to conceal a still more vexing problem: that the tapestries had shifted during the photographic process so that the tiles could not be reassembled. Only higher mathematics, and, as it turned out, two brothers from Russia, could put the tapestries back together again. And of course they did, using their new supercomputer to perform what the New Yorker calls “vast seas of calculations upon each individual pixel in order to make a complete image of [the] tapestry.”

This story covers a lot of ground, culturally, and it brings together really diverse elements. The temporal dimension stretches from the 16th century to the present day. The geographic one takes in Russia, France and the US. We’ve got diverse players: real estate tycoons, a prince of capital, a museum curator, mathematicians. We’ve got diverse institutions: a research institute, the New Yorker, the MET, an ancient French family, a look in from the Rockefellers. Badly written, I don’t see any reason why this couldn’t be a Dan Brown novel.

Diverse elements link implausibly (otherwise they wouldn’t be diverse). This is the Rube Goldberg aspect, with each connection apparently a most delicate, most implausible hinge. Working backwards, the ‘tapestry” problem cannot find its “brothers” solution unless the brothers meet a math teacher whose husband happens to be a MET curator who happens to come to lunch at the home of a prince of capital who happens, presumably, to know a real estate magnet, who happens to read a story in the New Yorker about two brothers who happened to come to the US and build a supercomputer in their living room.

I will supply Part II tomorrow. For those of you who have finished the Times Cross Word puzzle, here’s another. The diversity of contemporary culture continues to grow and we are now, in the words of one book on the topic of networks, “small pieces loosely joined.” But it is also true that new technologies, the web, email, blogs among them, have created new, more powerful way of casting connections across these diverse cultural spaces.

The question is this: which is growing faster: the universe or the networks?

I liked the Chudnovsky story because it might serve as a way of thinking about the question in, er, question.

References

Preston, Richard. 2005. Capturing the Unicorn. The New Yorker. April 8, 2005. pp. 28-33.

Weinberger, David. 2002. Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Cambridge: Perseus.