Blog/2024-06-12/A Japanese Mathematician

Yesterday, I happened upon a comment on Hacker News where a user laments the deletion of a Wikipedia article they'd made. The original version of the article they made was moved to draftspace because it primarily relied on the mathematician's CV PDF and then, because it was unattended for 6 months (predictably since it doesn't seem like the person who moved it to draftspace did anything to notify the author) was deleted.

Fortunately, you can undelete drafts by asking for that to be done. Afterwards, since I am a confirmed user (presumably from having been on the site for so long) I would have been allowed to move it back into mainspace. I fleshed out the article about Makoto Matsumoto primarily by adding a bunch of citations by searching the web and so on. I was unable to sign up for Asahi.com since it requires you to have a Japanese address and a Japanese form of address.

Regardless, after submitting the article for review and requesting one through the Wikipedia Teahouse it was soon added back.

I didn't really anticipate that happening so quickly, so I actually copied it over to here as well just in case.

Makoto Matsumoto

In the process of researching this mathematician, I built a certain picture of this man: his biggest discovery (the Mersenne Twister PRNG) was used everywhere but his name was barely known in English media. He had asthma so he had a futon in his office he'd lie down while mathsing.

He had a daughter, who must be 20 years old now, and his wife (a well-enough known manga artist that she's got obits in English language online) and he were married from 2000 to 2020. He grows rice with his father-in-law. He has a patented dog collar knot with his cousin. All sorts of facts.

But there's such a melancholy sensation of nostalgia to replaying the life of someone colourful like this. His personal website includes a page describing how he met his wife: He knew her through her work and then invited her to Matsumoto Makoto's Liver Protection Society General Meeting.

The invitation itself is a masterpiece, including this terrific invitation technique:

Therefore, please choose one of the three options - attending, not attending, or ambiguous - and email Matsumoto as soon as possible. We will list names of people in these three categories on the home page. Then, people in ambiguous status can contact each other freely and mark each other as attending or not attending.

and instruction that "rudeness is welcome". The party even had a results page where we are informed that Takuji Arai won the prize for being the least polite since he came there to hit on girls. A little note at the end tells us that Takuji ended up married one of the girls he met there, so I suppose it worked after all.

Part of why I wanted this blog/wiki is that few of my friends who wrote when we were young write like that any more and I think the Internet can do with some. Just a note of raw humanity untouched by refined branding. Honestly, it's as evocative for me of my childhood on the Internet at that time as any art.

I went and found my blog from many years past that point. I wrote that some 16 years ago and it's amusingly very identifiable to me as my own voice of the time. It's really something to see one's own childhood form. Embarrassing in many ways, yes, but also familiar.