The Gamma Number

By Jerome Francis Lusa

The novella "The Gamma Number" tells the discovery of a very large and very special number that can unlock universals secrets, and of the people who uncovered its wonders. The story contemplates fractal mathematics and the personalities of discovery.

Gayle and Amanda, thanks for all your help.

Lorem J. Fause
August, 2011

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jerome Francis Lusa
• Release date: Jan 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466036246

Jerome Francis Lusa

Jerome Francis Lusa has been dabbling in writing since attending the University of Connecticut in the late 1970's. Jerome's professional career has been writing computer software systems for many businesses throughout the State of Connecticut. His numerous letters to newspaper editors have appeared in The Hartford Courant and the Glastonbury Citizen. Now that his children are grown, he has started publishing his older stories and writing new ones, all as ebooks. Jerome publishes stories under his own name, and also as his alter ego, Lorem J Fause. The themes of his stories vary from a deer's stream of consciousness, to courage, bereavement, and several stops in between. Jerome sketches the covers and artwork for his stories. In his youth, writing was a way to explore ideas. Lately it has become a way to cleanse his demons.

Book preview

Preface

by the Author

This novella was a long time in coming. It started with an idea about a very special number, and followed where the characters led it. The characters are purely fictional. As for the Gamma Number, it might be fictional, or...?

Gayle and Amanda, thanks for all your help.

Jerome Francis Lusa

August, 2011

The Gamma Number

The Font of Discovery

Larry Dahns liked working with data. He held the position of Associate Data Analyst at Ergonomics Everywhere Incorporated, located in bucolic Granby Connecticut. He was one of the fifteen employees, most in their mid twenties, who were charged with collating raw study data from the company's various clients throughout the country and loading it into a single repository for analysis by the company’s statisticians. Larry's work wasn’t as intellectually demanding as it was disciplined: load this data set into this computer table, that data set into that computer table, and never screw up.

What distinguished Larry from his equally diligent and reliable peers, apart from his lean six foot four frame and gaunt good looks, were a personal curiosity about the data that he shepherded throughout the company’s computer systems, and a matching willfulness to use company computers for personal projects. Larry made it a habit to understand the parameters of each study, ostensibly so that he might find any problems in the data but also so that he could analyze the data on his own time, looking for patterns. He would often use company computers after hours to analyze data sets, which was technically against company policy.

Digital Input Systems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of computer keyboards, was experiencing an unusually high rate of warranty claims for their new line of keyboard models, which they had hoped would improve their market share in commodity keyboards. They had invested heavily in a new low cost technology for mounting the individual keys, and while the new mounts stood up to internal quality assurance tests, they were failing for customers at higher than expected rates. To find out why the keyboards were failing so frequently in the field, the quality assurance people at DIS hired Ergonomics Everywhere to evaluate sets of test data collected from new keyboards that had failed in DIS's own call centers.

Study #42

Keyboard study #42 was a typical project for Ergonomics Everywhere. The customer would deliver files of recorded keystrokes and the statisticians would deliver a definitive answer to the question, Was there a statistically significant correlation between certain keyboard behaviors and keyboard failure rates? To Larry Dahns, study #42 offered a special attraction, for it included a set of seemingly random data, which he would like to search for possible patterns. He was excited when he found out he would be handling the data massaging and conversion for the study.

It didn’t offend Larry's morality that the files consisted of sequences of keystrokes that had been gathered secretly by the subjects’ employer. Though the files might contain the private thoughts of DIS employees, it had been legally established in the mid 1990’s that employers had the right to covertly monitor employees’ use of company equipment. Larry wouldn't be crossing any ethical lines by viewing the DIS people's keystrokes. Nor did it particularly bother Larry that he would spend several hours of company computer time perusing data sets after he officially filed them for statistical review. If he had ever struggled between the ethics of personal use of company computers and curiosity, curiosity had won long ago. What motivated Larry was a new source of data, random at that, and a plan on how to analyze it.

Keyboards and Frustrations

The quality assurance department at DIS had contracted with Ergonomics Everywhere to find patterns in keyboard usage. They knew which keyboards had failed, but not why. They wanted to know how many times each key was pressed on the test subjects’ keyboards, but also they wanted a measure of the aggressiveness each subject had toward the keyboard. In particular, they wanted to determine which of their employees were wafting their hands across the keyboards out of frustration or rage. The latter measure was an acknowledgment that the Digital Input System's call center staff often experienced a high degree of frustration due to the interaction with irate customers. It would take some special algorithms to separate valid keystrokes from those that were unintentional, and this was one of Ergonomics Everywhere's specialties.

The study’s data set consisted of hundreds of files, each a collection of keystrokes from a call center employee's keyboard taken over a period of days, with timestamps for when the keys were pressed. There were multiple files for each employee, and many employees. Much of the data was in the form of text typed into outbound e-mails, or the information that the call center collected during their interactions with customers. Ergonomics Everywhere was under the usual non-disclosure agreement not to divulge the contents of their client’s data.

Larry Dahns’ role in Study #42 included calculating raw keystroke counts for each incoming file, running a stripper routine on each file to remove the timestamps and all the normally typed text, and then calculating keystroke counts for the stripped files. The stripped files would contain only the random characters from typographic errors or that the subject had pressed when anxiety and frustration got the better of them, and would provide a second measure of the subject's wear on the keyboards. Lastly, Larry would send both sets of counts to Ergonomics Anywhere's statisticians for an analysis of the correlation between the number of keys pressed and the broken keys. Larry chose the stripped files for his personal study, thinking they would contain essentially random data.

Fractals

Dan Roberts and Susan White had seemingly little in common apart from their involvement in the Fractal Society and the fact that they had been dating for nearly a year. She was taller than him by at least an inch and her flowing red hair and svelte figure were in contrast with his tussled brunette tuft and stocky build. Whatever bonds kept them together lie below the surface of appearances.

Dan worked as a computer programmer. He was drawn to the rational world of programming languages the way moths are drawn to the flame of a candle in the dark. The allure of a perfectly stated algorithm was stronger for him than his basic instinctual drives. He worked long hours. While programming he would often forget to eat, and it pained him to leave work in order to get some sleep.

Even when he wasn’t at work, Dan found ways to be programming computers. He had become the de facto software guru at the Fractal Society of Atlanta, Georgia. Not that he would have ever joined the Society on his own initiative. Only the enthused insistence of his then-new girlfriend could have pushed a recluse like Dan into the Society’s social setting. And were it not for the technical nature of the Society’s chosen topic, Dan would have drifted away from such a social gathering long ago. He loved the challenge of programming fractal algorithms, and he especially enjoyed discovering new ways of tuning the calculation and display routines to explore deeper into the infinite depths of fractal space.

Susan White knew little of the inner workings of computers, programming languages, or even of the algorithms that produced fractals. She was only vaguely aware that there was a main formula behind fractal images and that the formula was run repeatedly for every dot on the screen. Her profession was graphic art, and she was visually drawn to fractal images. She had even incorporated fractal concepts in a few of her commercial designs, though always careful to avoid unnecessary detail that might detract from the message her clients sought. The Fractal Society allowed her an avenue into