UniversalMonk

Great article on how people are helping prisoners solve advanced math problems in prison. Inspiring.

Math is giving meaning to many behind bars. So ya don't have to deal with paywall:

Pioneering Advanced Math from Behind Bars

Math research gives meaning to years spent in prison

By Amory Tillinghast-Raby Edited by Madhusree Mukerjee

Three years ago Christopher Havens, serving a prison sentence of more than two decades for murder, published a discovery in number theory from his cell. Havens and three co-authors showed that a significant class of fractions often maintains a regular structure after being transformed algebraically. Remarkably, Havens had no access to computers, which are typically used for such calculations. Instead, he painstakingly pieced his research together by hand.

Now, a nonprofit co-founded by Havens has developed a computational programming platform using one of the few technologies accessible in prison: highly restricted, text-only email. As this new facility offers more opportunities, more incarcerated individuals are diving into advanced mathematics to give meaning to their time behind bars.

Havens, who dropped out of high school as a sophomore, began his math journey in solitary confinement. "It brings out the worst in a lot of people," he says. "Right above you, you’ve got this fluorescent light that never shuts off, not even to sleep. You’ve got these guys screaming. You have people kicking the wall." To escape, Havens began solving math puzzles—first Sudoku, then packets of algebra problems slipped under his door. "I would get lost in it for days," he says. "I would dream about it." By the time he left solitary, Havens was deep into calculus and venturing into number theory, which he would later publish in.

However, teaching yourself mathematics in prison means getting stuck—not just on a problem, but on how to find the solution. "Imagine you don’t have a professor," says James Conway III, studying measure theory from Ohio’s death row. "You’re on your own." After being released from solitary, Havens wrote to a journal at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, asking for a mathematician to correspond with. Months later, researchers from Turin, Italy, responded. Their first question: How is a continued fraction transformed by the operation (af + b) / (cf + d)?

Continued fractions are like mathematical matryoshka dolls, one inside the next, and Havens calculated formulas for specific transformations in these fractions—handwritten on notebook pages that covered his cell. "It took over two years to do the math," Havens says.

For those incarcerated, the days of solving 21st-century problems with pen and paper might soon be numbered. The Prison Mathematics Project (PMP), co-founded by Havens, is helping others in prison study mathematics. With mentorship in topics like combinatorics and abstract algebra, the project has paired 171 incarcerated individuals in 27 states with mentors. One participant, Travis Cunningham, is preparing to submit research on mathematical physics for publication. The project has developed a system to let inmates write computer programs using the prison's text-only email system.

The PMP Console acts as a relay. Inmates email their code to the console, a cloud-based system runs the program in isolation, and the results are returned. Havens has already tested this system with Carsten Elsner, a mathematician at the University of Applied Sciences for Economics in Hannover, Germany. They are working on Zopf, a continued fraction with a specific sequence of integers. Havens and Elsner hope to prove that calculating the greatest common factor among these fractions forms a twisting pattern.

But Zopf also has a symbolic meaning. In German folklore, a nobleman escapes a swamp by lifting himself with his braid. "Zopf" translates to "braid," and the name captures Havens’s own journey. Mathematics, he says, "lifted me out of the swamp."

Although the PMP Console has potential, obstacles remain. Sending an email can cost up to 50 cents, while inmates earn just 52 cents per hour. And some prisons have rules that prevent the sending of "encoded" messages, including computer code. Securus Technologies, a major prison e-mail provider, is reviewing the possibility of incorporating the PMP Console into its education platform.

Despite challenges, the PMP is not just a tech project. It's an opportunity for prisoners to rebuild their lives through mathematics. "Until I started studying math, my life had just been chaos and destruction," Cunningham says. "When I got my first text on partial differential equations, I learned what love is."

For Havens, this transformation is the essence of justice. "Justice happens when you begin to fix what led you to prison in the first place," he says. Though some debts may never be fully paid, more and more people in prison are turning to mathematics to escape their own swamps.

Ned Kelly was an Australian outlaw, known for his defiant stand against colonial authorities in the late 19th century, culminating in his capture and execution after leading a rebellion against the police.

The Jerilderie Letter doesn't explicitly mention anarchism, but its themes align pretty good with anarchist principles.

Ned Kelly criticizes the established authority, particularly the colonial legal system, and speaks out against police brutality and the exploitation of his family, which aligns with anarchist critiques of state power and hierarchical structures.

Hs rejection of authority and advocacy for justice and equality can be seen as a precursor to some of the anti-authoritarian ideas found in anarchist thought.

Over 5,000 people attended the mass memorial meeting called by the Anti-Militarist League for Berg, Hanson, and Caron, the three anarchists killed in the Lexington Avenue explosion. Over 800 policemen monitored the meeting, while Berkman, Abbott, Edelsohn, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, David Sullivan and Charles Plunkett all spoke for their dead comrades.

Technology; Piracy in Era Of Computers

Feb. 24, 1983 - The New York Times

AFTER a number of false starts against the black market in computer software and hardware, efforts are under way to protect future computer products by making each one as distinctive as the person who uses it and thus harder to copy.

As a result, there may be gradual erosion of the difference between hardware and software and a significant change in the way ordinary users purchase and operate their computers.

Over the short run, manufacturers acknowledge privately, the battle against software pirates is already lost. Most software comes packaged on floppy disks, record-like pieces of plastic that store information. And most computers include utility programs making it possible for even a novice to make an exact electronic back-up copy of almost any commercially available program.

Thus computer owners can exchange thousands of dollars worth of software as easily as children trade bubble-gum cards.

Some mail-order houses sell pirated copies of software for half the cost of the original.

Efforts by legitimate manufacturers to encode their programs to prevent copying have merely led to an expensive cat-and mouse game, in which determined hobbyists and pirates break the codes as fast as manufacturers create them.

Manufacturers hope for better luck with the next generation of computers. Seymour Rubinstein, president of the Micropro International Corporation, a leading software house, said, ''Eventually each machine and program will have a specific identity, and they will only run together.''

In the most widely suggested plan, every computer in the country would be sold with an electronic ''serial number'' in the computer's central processing unit. The machine would compare its own number with one embossed on the software sold to the machine's owner. Users could make unlimited back-up copies but could not pass them on because neither the machine nor the software could operate unless the numbers matched.

But a problem, according to Mr. Rubenstein, arises if the computer is repaired or replaced. Users would find that their old software would not operate with the new machine. ''There are ways around that, but we're still working on it,'' said Mr. Rubenstein, who is studying copy-protection methods with a committee of the Association for Data Processing Service Organizations.

In a variation of the serial-number plan, the first use of new software would prompt a message from the computer showing the identification numbers of the program and of the machine itself. The user would make a telephone call to the manufacturer, giving his credit card number and the two serial numbers, and would receive a code to make the software function on that machine.

More radical plans envision the elimination of floppy disks, which many people already regard as an inefficient way to store information.

Instead of a disk, a computer program would be stored on a ROM, meaning ''Read Only Memory.'' This is a computer chip engraved with unalterable computer instructions. When purchased, the computer would already include chips containing popular software, such as word processing programs, spreadsheets for financial planning or graphics packages. But access to the programs would be limited to users paying the price for the key to unlock the full powers of their machine.

Some people advocate building the software into the hardware. They cite home arcade games as their model. Game cartridges are essentially ROM's that are plugged into the side of the machine. While they can be copied, doing so is difficult and expensive. Kaufman Research Manufacturing Inc., a small company in Mountain View, Calif., recently received patent approval for a ROM that will execute a program but will not disclose the full structure of the program, the prerequisite to copying. ''The only way to replicate it,'' said Marc T. Kaufman, inventor of the device, ''is to put it under an electron microscope.''

But merging hardware and software has its problems. Unlike a simple Pac-Man game, a sophisticated program cannot just be plugged into the machine. And permanently installed chips limit consumers to using the programs provided by the manufacturer of the computer.

''If this industry has learned anything in the past year,'' said Rick Magnuson, director of retail marketing for Digital Research, ''it should be that consumers like to select their own software.'' Programs embedded in the machine are also impossible to update without changing chips. Mr. Rubenstein likens the problem to ''buying a video cassette recorder with all the movies already built in.''

Fighting the software pirates means headaches for ordinary users. ''Any system of locks and preventive measures makes everyone's life more difficult,'' said Edward Currie, president of Lifeboat Associates, a New York software producer. ''The last thing a manufacturer should want to do today is traumatize his customers.''