Macarthur Fellows

"When Texas seceded in 1836, it seceded in order to form a slaveholding republic. If you don’t teach that, then children are not able to understand all of the inequality that they have today."

"the entire premise of The 1619 Project is that the legacy of slavery was not banished along with the institution of slavery in 1865, that slavery is one of the oldest institutions in our society. The English settled Jamestown in 1607. And by 1619, just 12 years later, they’re engaging in African slavery. So, that is 150 years before they even decide that they want to become their own country. And that slavery shaped everything, nearly everything, about the country that would ultimately be established."

"If we are truly a great nation, the truth cannot destroy us."

"It is time for them to make reparations to the descendants of chattel slavery in the Americas. This is our global truth, the truth we as human beings understand with stark clarity: There can be no atonement if there’s no repair. It is time — it is long past time — for reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and all the devastation that it has wrought, and all the devastation that it continues to reap."

"I have long said and claimed Ida B. Wells-Barnett as my spiritual godmother. She was honestly the first example of a Black woman doing the type of journalism that I wanted to do, which should tell you how undiverse or nondiverse the field of investigative reporting is, that I didn’t actually know living examples of Black women investigative reporters when I was young. So, she was a pioneering investigative journalist who really brought the scourge of lynching to a global audience. She would go into towns where a Black man or woman had just been lynched, and she would interview people, and she would document. And she was actually one of the early data reporters, because she started to collect data on how many lynchings were occurring, what were the reasons given for those lynchings, and then what did her reporting show. She also was a true intersectional woman. She was a suffragist and had to fight both for women’s rights to vote and against the racism within the suffragist movement. She was a civil rights activist. She was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where she had to fight against gender discrimination as a Black woman. And so, in so many ways, she was just this pioneering woman who fought for civil rights and equal rights across many fronts. And she was a woman who was largely reviled by white media. And I have in my Twitter bio that I’m a nasty — a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress, because that’s what The New York Times, where I work, called Ida B. Wells while she was engaging in her anti-lynching crusade. So I take great strength from knowing that the attacks on me and the attacks on my work are really just part of a lineage of what happens when Black women and Black women journalists dare to challenge power and challenge authority. So, to receive the acknowledgment for this work about the Black experience on the same day that Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who like so many Black journalists never received the acknowledgment that they deserved, was just deeply gratifying, because I do my work in service of them."

"We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans."

"just as important to remembering the legacy of the transatlantic slavery are the stories of Black resistance that would, more than any other force, lead to slavery’s collapse in our hemisphere."

"the defining story of the African diaspora in the Americas is not slavery, but our resistance to it, of people determined to be free in societies that did not believe they had a right to freedom."

"As we remember our brutal enslavement by people who believed themselves to be civilized, even as they tortured, abused and murdered other human beings for profit, for sugar for their tea, for molasses for their rum, for cotton to wear and for tobacco to smoke, we must remember most the fierce Black radical tradition of resistance, that did not begin with anti-colonialism efforts on the continent or with civil rights movements in the United States and other places, but with, as the scholar Cedric Robinson argued, the Cimarrones of Mexico, who ran away to Indigenous communities or formed their own fugitive communities known as palenques..."

"The racism we are fighting today was originally conjured to justify working unfree Black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for ... all the ancillary white people ... who earned their living and built their wealth from that free Black labor."

"None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own."

"we, the people of the African diaspora, should not have to find ourselves still resisting. It is long past time for the European colonial powers, for the United States of America to live up to their own professed ideas, to become the great and moral nations that they believe themselves to be. It is not enough to simply regret what was done in the past; they are obligated to repair it."

"We must remember that it was not merely the Enlightenment ideas, some reckoning amongst white abolitionists, that brought the end to the system that had enriched colonial powers, but that abolition was propelled by constant revolt that forced colonial powers to realize, as scholar Mary Reckford wrote, it would remain “more expensive and dangerous to maintain the old system than to abolish it.” Black people were actors in their own freedom. Obscuring and marginalizing stories of Black resistance serves to justify the hypocrisy of colonial Europe and the United States by insinuating that had slavery been so bad, surely, African peoples would have fought harder against it. These are lies of omission that in the absence of truth warp our collective memory."

"People who make a difference do not die alone. Something dies in everyone who was affected by them. Amos made a great deal of difference, and when he died, life was dimmed and diminished for many of us. There is less intelligence in the world. There is less wit. There are many questions that will never be answered with the same inimitable combination of depth and clarity. There are standards that will not be defended with the same mix of principle and good sense. Life has become poorer. There is a large Amos-shaped gap in the mosaic, and it will not be filled. It cannot be filled because Amos shaped his own place in the world, he shaped his life, and even his dying. And in shaping his life and his world, he changed the world and the life of many around him."

"Creeping determinism."

"Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle."

"It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place."

"Let us take what the terrain gives."

"People predict by making up stories. People predict very little and explain everything. People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not. People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough. People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts. The handwriting was on the wall. It was just the ink that was invisible. People often work hard to obtain information they already have and avoid new knowledge. Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe. In this match, surprises are expected. Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable. A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place."

"“It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on."

"He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises."

"The development of wavelets is an example where ideas from many different fields combined to merge into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The subject area of wavelets, developed mostly over the last 15 years, is connected to older ideas in many other fields, including pure and applied mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering."

"We present three recent developments in wavelets and subdivision: wavelet-type transforms that map integers to integers, with an application to lossless coding for images; rate-distortion bounds that realize the compression given by nonlinear approximation theorems for a model where wavelet compression outperforms the Karhunen-Loeve approach; and smoothness results for irregularly spaced subdivision schemes, related to wavelet compression for irregularly spaced data."

"The wavelet transform is a tool that cuts up data or functions or operators into different frequency components, and then studies each component with a resolution matched to its scale. Forerunners of this technique were invented independently in pure mathematics (Calderón's resolution of the identity in harmonic analysis—see e.g., Calderón (1964), physics (coherent states for the (ax + b)-group in quantum mechanics, first constructed by Aslaksen and Klauder (1968), and linked to the hydrogen atom Hamiltonian by Paul (1985)) and engineering (QMF filters by Esteban and Galland (1977), and later QMF filters with exact reconstruction property by Smith and Barnwell (1986), Vetterli (1986) in electrical engineering; wavelets were proposed for the analysis of seismic data by J. Morlet (1983)). The last five years have seen a synthesis between all these different approaches, which has been very fertile for all the fields concerned."

"... In their mathematical aspect, wavelets are rooted in the use of dilations and convolutions in Calderón-Zygmund theory in harmonic analysis. ... Algorithmically, wavelets are related to subband filtering in electrical engineering. Subband filtering was developed from the 70-s on; exact reconstruction procedures were discovered in the early 80-s. These were obviously fast algorithms, meant as a front-end processing step before encoding or compressing information in various types of signals. A lot of effort went into optimizing the filters for various applications, and this subfield of electrical engineering is now quite mature. ... Another algorithmic ancestor of wavelets are the multiple algorithms in numerical analysis, closer to mathematics, but still ad hoc."

"Mathematicians have various ways of judging the merits of new theorems and constructions. One very important criterion is esthetic — some developments just “feel” right, fitting, and beautiful. Just as in other venues where beauty or esthetics are discussed, taste plays an important role in this, but I think I am not alone in being especially excited when apparently different fields suddenly meet in a new concept, a new understanding. It is often of the sparks of such encounters that our esthetic enjoyment of mathematics is born. Another important criterion for according merit to some particular piece of mathematics is the extent to which it can be useful in applications; this is the criterion almost exclusively used by nonmathematicians."

"In Julia Robinson we find a mathematician who was a heroine in her own time and a role model for all time. It is a story of childhood, illness, love, marriage, disappointment, obsession, and triumph."

"In this paper, we shall show the validity of an iterative procedure suggested by George W. Brown ... This method corresponds to each player choosing in turn the best pure strategy against the accumulated mixed strategy of his opponent up to then."

"We say a mathematical theory is decidable if there is an effective method of determining the validity of each statement of the theory. If there is no such method, the theory is undecidable. It is clear that if there is a mechanical way of transforming each statement of an undecidable theory into an equivalent statement of another theory, the second theory is also undecidable. This principle, together with the fact that the arithmetic of natural numbers is undecidable, enables us to solve the decision problem for fields of finite degree over the rationals."

"And I continued to struggle with the Tenth Problem. In 1961 Martin Davis, Hilary Putnam, and I published a joint paper, "The undecidability of exponential diophantine equations," which used ideas from the papers Martin and I had presented at the International Congress along with various new results. The paper contains what is sometimes referred to as the Robinson hypothesis (or, as Martin calls it, "J.R.") to the effect that if there were some diophantine relation that grew faster than an exponential but not too terribly fast—less than some function could be expressed in exponentials—then we would be able to define exponentiation. It would follow from the definition that exponential diophantine equations would be equivalent to diophantine equations and that, therefore, the solution to Hilbert's tenth problem would be negative. At the time many people told Martin that this approach was misguided, to say the least. They were more polite to me."

"Notices: Can you tell me your memories of Julia Robinson, what she was like as a person? Davis: Very nice, very straightforward. Broad in her interests, mathematical and otherwise. And great power—there is no question in my mind that she was a much more powerful mathematician than I. We worked together on a problem on which we didn’t get anywhere. We were trying to prove the unsolvability of the decision problem for word equations. It turned out that we wouldn’t have been able to do that because the problem is solvable. Makanin solved it positively."

"We need to make decisions that make us less consumptive and reduce our reliance on nitrogen. It's like a carbon footprint. But you can reduce your nitrogen footprint. I do it by not eating much meat -- I still like a little every now and then -- not using corn oil, driving a car that I can put nonethanol gas in and get better gas mileage. Just things like that that can make a difference. So I'm challenging, not just you, but I challenge a lot of people, especially in the Midwest -- think about how you're treating your land and how you can make a difference. So my steps are very small steps. To change the type of agriculture in the US is going to be many big steps. And it's going to take political and social will for that to happen. But we can do it. I strongly believe we can translate the science, bridge it to policy and make a difference in our environment. We all want a clean environment."

"What we need to think about perhaps for Mission Blue is increasing the biologging capacity. How is it that we can actually take this type of activity elsewhere? And then finally -- to basically get the message home -- maybe use live links from animals such as blue whales and white sharks. Make killer apps, if you will. A lot of people are excited when sharks actually went under the Golden Gate Bridge. Let's connect the public to this activity right on their iPhone. That way we do away with a few internet myths. So we can save the bluefin tuna. We can save the white shark. We have the science and technology. Hope is here. Yes we can. We need just to apply this capacity further in the oceans."

"It's taken me a long time to understand how deeply traumatic that was, that that experience remains an invisible brand stamped between my shoulder blades. And in many ways, I've been - I spent a lifetime trying to make sense of what that trauma has meant to me."

"As writers, of course we’re interested in human beings, human stories, human trauma, and all that is very compelling for readers. But when we write these powerful stories about individual people, we have the illusion that we’ve made a difference. And of course we have—people read the books, they’re touched emotionally by these kinds of stories, and that’s great. But to the extent that the stories that we’re telling are about people who are weaker, in some way—they come from a small country, or a forcibly removed population, they’re underrepresented collectively—individual stories don’t change the conditions that produce those refugees in the first place…"

"In his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: "The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering." One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco's Chinatown. (p 196)"

"Implicitly, the novel insists that a true war story has to take into account not just combat and soldiers, but civilians, the home front, and the military-industrial complex. For me, war is more than guns and shooting. That’s the spectacle that distracts us from how pervasive war is throughout a society and how it makes all of us complicit through things like paying taxes and watching horrifying images on TV without doing anything to stop them from happening…"

"I follow in this tradition because I believe literature matters, and in this book I insist that Asian American literature literally embodies the contradictions, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture"

"Fiction and nonfiction accomplish very different things, but they can overlap. I wanted my fiction to seem nonfictional, and my nonfiction to seem fictional. At the same time, in fiction I could say things I couldn’t get away with in nonfiction without footnotes. And in nonfiction, I could make things explicit that I couldn’t say in fiction because of the viewpoint of my protagonist."

"It’s much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you’re representing people in a truthful way. These characters are purely fiction—they’re inspired by people I met—which I think gave me a certain amount of leeway that I wouldn’t have had otherwise were it a verbatim piece."

"We go in and try to be completely transparent with them: I am not a journalist, I’m a playwright, and I’m developing a piece that is creative and not going to be solely based on their lives but inspired by conversations that we have."

"The thing is, I can’t control that built-in bias because it’s going to exist. What I can do is reflect the world through my very unique prism and perhaps people will be able to relate. I can’t control how it’s received, nor do I want to control how it’s perceived. What I want is for people to go into the theatre and in some way their perception is shifted, so that if they do enter with their biases, perhaps they won’t leave with them."

"My motto when I was writing this was ‘replace judgment with curiosity’."

"When I’m writing, I can see myself in all of the characters I write."

"“I’m tired of lip service…There’s a lot of: ‘We really want to do this’, and then I realise they just don’t listen. They say they want your voice, but when you use your voice, they don’t want to do anything you say."

"It shocked me and concerned me how quickly we criminalize and don’t give second chances to young men of color, and particularly young African American men…"

"I had been reading Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, which talks about mass incarceration and mass incarceration being the new Jim Crow. But I really believe education is also the new Jim Crow right now because there is so much segregation in education, and there’s an excessive system of have and have-nots. So I was first and foremost interested in exploring the school-to-prison pipeline because of how personally it affected some people in my life."

"Gravity is not an option in string theory. It is a logical consequence of it!"

"The quantum dualities, which are known as S-duality or U-duality, extend the classical T-duality and lead to a beautiful and coherent picture of stringy dualities. These exchange highly quantum situations with semiclassical backgrounds, exchange different branes, etc. As in the classical dualities, among all dual descriptions there is at most one description which is natural because it is semiclassical. All other dual descriptions are very quantum mechanical."

"Whenever you work on something and try to solve one problem, and you end up helping or solving many other problems, it is a sign that what you are doing is good."