A is for Algorithm: The Substance of Math Not Seen

I’m easily impressed by math. Grammar doesn’t faze me at all – I can talk gerunds and the pluperfect tense with the best of  'em – but I’m awed when a person casually dismisses some service or piece of software that I think sounds utterly complex, almost magic, with the phrase ‘So it’s just an algorithm, right?’

Like, er, one of the frogs did yesterday on our way to TEDGlobal.

We’d been talking about the way the TEDGlobal website uses attendees’ self-selected profile attributes to suggest everyone an individual ‘TED top ten’– ten people you really should meet while you’re at TED. It’s a gentle and unthreatening way of seeding the networking that makes TED what it is.

Appropriately enough on the day some of us visited WWII code-centre, Bletchley Park, there were a lot of algorithms around today. The nice woman at the TOMS shoes booth was talking about how they estimate what shoe sizes to bring so that every TEDster gets a pair that fits, while Xavier Helgesen from Better World Books was mentioning the clever software his company wrote to enable them to sell books online for the best price, so they can help fund literacy initiatives around the world. He described it ‘like a stockmarket for ISBN numbers’. There’s gotta be an algorithm or two in there somewhere...

-- Antonia Ward