6 . Atomic shapes are so simple that they can’t be broken down any further. Mathematicians are trying to turn to artificial intelligence (AI) for help to build a periodic table of these shapes, hoping it will assist in finding yet-unknown atomic shapes.

Tom Coates at Imperial College London and his colleagues are working to classify atomic shapes known as Fano varieties, which are so simple that they can’t be broken down into smaller components. Just as chemists arranged element s in the periodic table by their atomic weight and group to reveal new insights, the researchers hope that organizing these atomic shapes by their various properties will help in understanding them.

The team has given each atomic shape a sequence of numbers based on its features such as the number of holes it has or the extent to which it bends around itself. This acts as a bar code (条形码) to identify it. Coates and his colleagues have now created an AI that can predict certain properties of these shapes from their bar code numbers alone, with an accuracy of 98 percent.

The team member Alexander Kasprzyk at the University of Nottingham, UK, says that the AI has let the team organize atomic shapes in a way that begins to follow the periodic table, so that when you read from left to right, or up and down, there seem to be general patterns in the geometry (几何) of the shapes.

Graham Nib lo at the University of Southampton, UK, stresses that humans will still need to understand the results provided by AI and create proofs of these ideas. “AI has definitely got unbelievable abilities. But in the same way that telescopes (望远镜) don’t put astronomers out of work, AI doesn’t put mathematicians out of work,” he says. “It just gives us new backing that allows us to explore parts of the mathematical landscape that are out of reach.”

The team hopes to improve the model to the point where missing spaces in its periodic table could point to the existence of unknown shapes.

Men Wanted

For a dangerous journey: small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, and safe return uncertain. Honor and reward will follow if it is successful.

Earnest Shackleton

9 . The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003.

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia (“哥伦比亚”号航天飞机)______ into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the shattered shuttle flew toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate ______ of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam (绝缘泡沫胶) that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also   ______ out a less direct, more surprising cause. Engineers had known about - and inappropriately______ - the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were ______ in a series of overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials.

By the start of 2003, the phrase “death by PowerPoint” had well and truly entered the ______ vocabulary. Edward Tufte was the first to have taken it literally: That spring, the Yale statistician published a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, whose core argument was that the medium of communication influences the substance of communication. While PowerPoint, as a medium, did not ______ create unclear, lazy presentations, it certainly ______ and sometimes even masked them — with potentially deadly consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides.

Wired ran an excerpt (节选) from Tufte’s booklet in September 2003 under the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included his assessment — summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” — in its ______ of the year’s most important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of confusion,” the entry read.

Despite the backlash it inspired in the ______, the presentation giant rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, well into the hundreds of millions. During lockdown, people ______ PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil ______ the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. Today’s concerns about social media somehow resemble the PowerPoint critique. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies ______ form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid.

______, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. If the innovation did change the way we think, we are measuring its effects with an altered mind. Either the critical remarks were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the   ______.

I am honored to give a presentation about Chinese culture to international students at your invitation.

Sincerely yours,

Li Hua