Dinner with Taiwan’s Minister Lin
Well, my third article today. As you can see, I am just emerging from a fairly hectic week, typical of what happens after returning from a two-week trip.
Last week I described a little bit about my trip to Taiwan, as part of a research collaboration there. During that trip, I was asked to join a dinner with the Minister of State for Taiwan, Ferng-Ching Lin (essentially something like a combination of Secretary of Commerce and State for Taiwan). Now, I realize that dinner with a politician is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea. And, I have to admit, I was not exactly relishing the opportunity. But, in fact, I was really pleasantly surprised by Minister Lin.
Yes, Minister Lin is a politician. But unlike many or most of the politicians you meet in the US, Minister Lin has a Ph.D. in mathematics. What’s more, he was a professor, first in mathematics at National Cheng Kung University, and then later in computer science (!) at National Taiwan University. He is now finishing out his time in government, where he has oversight of all Taiwan government science and technology policy and budget issues, and may return to academia.
In our discussions, I found Minister Lin to be a simply charming man. Flanked by me on one side and Berkeley’s Doug Tygar on the other, Minister Lin talked extensively about how “computational thinking” is so useful in political life. As examples, he described how concepts such as divide-and-conquer, heuristic search, structural induction, and formal specification all have application in daily political life. He described how he used to teach a formal semantics course, and the similarities between teaching denotational semantics to students vs economic policy to voters. (And yes, there were the requisite jokes about infinite loops and blue-screens-of-death ;-).
In thinking about our Center for Computational Thinking, I couldn’t help but wish I could capture Minister Lin’s thoughts and words and disseminate them more widely. Perhaps we’ll be able to get him to visit for a seminar one day soon.
Peter Lee @ January 21, 2008