Let me tell you about my friend, George. His name is Zhijing Mou, but we speak in English, so I call him George. His personal name is Zhijing and family name Mou.

George was born perhaps around 1950, perhaps in Lushun, once known as Port Arthur, the place of Russian occupation in Manchuria before the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. Although a Chinese city it was unique in being Westernized by the Russians, also industrialized by the Japanese. For example George grew up with gas cooking, which would have been unusual at that time in China. At some point he moved to Beijing. His parents are named in his thesis acknowledgements but I know nothing more about them, their history, work, aspirations, or other special qualities, or his siblings. I think he had a sister, a wife, a son.

George went to the Beijing #4 high school for boys, the top high school in the country. "I always thought it was natural that I should be number one", he said, "because in sports and academics teachers always said so." He said, "I always studied for love, not for praise or because others, teachers or parents wanted me to."

This is the true lesson of George Mou; I hope we can all learn it. If I may say, to study for love means when an idea comes in to your mind through your effort of reading or listening or doing, you don't just capture its outer forms, or learn to manipulate it in one effective way or another, but you savor it in your mouth, so to speak, you look at it adoringly from all directions, you experience it and extract the juice from it, not by force but by love, by acceptance and repeated exploration of its qualities and consequences and by seeing its new perspective and how that changes every bit of your world. By turning the diamond in your hand and seeing the colors change, and understanding the patterns there too. When you've really got it, it is part of your way of looking at the world, and then you can move on. It's a no-hurry view of learning, which 10 years in the Stone Age countryside might enable for you. Have I got that right?

At a young age George thought politics was similar to math and physics, in that there might be a right answer, and that thinking might reveal it. But in politics the right answer is what the Party says, so George had some learning to do. Around 18 his world erupted in the Cultural Revolution. Possibly Romance also had some seismic effects, which brought George to the study of Russian and German romantic philosophers and writers. It was Lenin, who said, I think George said, Noone can be a communist who has not made himself familiar with the wisdom of the past. But the romantic philosophers (Goethe? Tolstoy?) did not solve George's romantic problems, however, so if I had to guess, like I also did at that age, he put his head down and bulled forward using his particular talents to do what he particularly could do, or thought he could do, for the betterment of the world.

It was still during high school that George initiated and edited a newspaper that printed six famous issues during a particularly dynamic wave of the Cultural Revolution in Beijing. By serendipity and courage he was an energetic front man for the hidden leader, Yu Luoke, who kept his byline anonymous but was later arrested (1968) and eventually shot by firing squad at Beijing Worker's Stadium (1970). Friends or co-conspirators helped by writing articles, and George served as editor. Yu Luoke's story has echoes in George's story. Both studied hard during their time in the countryside. Both risked their lives for the principle of equality for all. Yu Luoke's poem applies also to George: "If you ask me where I am going now, I am going to the horizon and will shake the earth."

Notes on Yu Luoke from "Defeating the New Caste System", University of Chicago master's thesis by Lyu "Henry" Cheng, 2022.

Yu Luoke was looking forward to working in the countryside because he wanted to explore uncharted territory in his daily life by doing social research even after he had lost the opportunity to go to university. During his time in the countryside, he read extensively in philosophy, literature, and social sciences and kept many diaries. In addition, he took another college entrance examination but was still unable to gain admission because of his family origin. (Cheng p29)

Before Yu Luoke left the farm in 1964, he wrote another poem to express his ambition after returning to Beijing: "If you ask me where I am going now, I am going to the horizon and will shake the earth." (Ye, Shisheng: “The Yu Luoke I Know”, in Yu, Luoke, Xiao Xu, Dong Ding, and Youyu Xu. Yu Luoke: Posthumous Work and Memories, pp.213. Beijing: China federation of literary and art circles publishing house, 1999. The original text in Chinese is “欲问斯人今何 去，远到天边撼地球”.)

"...devoting their share of responsibility to the future of the country and the world" Yu Luoke, On Family Origin

"...any ambitious youth should make up his mind to reform himself. Thus, bad influence notwithstanding, bad things can be turned into good things, and resistance into impetus. Without such a firm determination to reform oneself, good behavior would be pointless and irrelevant, and the consequences would be unimaginable." Yu Luoke, On Family Origin

Mou Zhijing (牟 志京), who later became a comrade of Yu Luoke, posted a large- character poster in August 1966 opposing the couplet "If the father is a hero, the son is also a hero; if the father is a reactionary, the son is a bastard" and was violently abused by the Red Guards as a result. (Cheng p 39)

The leading writer and opinion leader of the Journal of Middle-School Cultural Revolution was Yu Luoke. However, the newspaper was not initially founded by Yu Luoke but by Mou Zhijing, who contacted Yu Luowen after reading On Family origin and then co-founded it based on some chance. According to Mou's recollection, after he got in touch with Yu Luowen [Yu Luoke's younger brother] they made minor rhetorical changes to the essay. (Although the author of the article was Yu Luoke, Mou Zhijing did not know Yu Luoke at this time, and Yu Luoke himself did not seem to have been involved in this round of revisions. It was only after the publication of the first issue of the Journal that Mou Zhijing came to know Yu Luoke through Yu Luowen). After completing the revisions to the article On Family origin, Mou Zhijing and Yu Luowen went to a printing house through their connections. They attempted to print the latest version of the article and continue posting it on the streets. However, when the latest version was printed, they found that the article only took up three-quarters of the paper, with a quarter of the space left blank. For aesthetic reasons, Yu Luowen, Mou Zhijing, and others decided to use the blank space on the printed page and add some other text. This idea was the origin of the Journal of Middle-School Cultural Revolution. (Cheng p39-40)

...

.. in the winter of 1967, Yu Luoke and several of his supporters (as well as all of his siblings) started an underground journal, the Journal of Middle-school Cultural Revolution (“中学文革报” Zhongxue Wenge Bao) to continue the public discussion on the issue of family origin, forming a unique student social movement in Beijing. Eventually, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China denounced and blocked the underground journal and Yu Luoke’s political ideas in April 1967. Yu Luoke was arrested and executed in 1970 as a rebel.

If you recall, or know about, that history, this was a time in which Chairman Mao felt he was being sidelined by the other powers in the Chinese Communist Party and in which he returned himself to power by Big Character Posters calling for the youth to, for example, "Bomb the Headquarters", and in short to disrespect authority and create their own authorities and voice. Among these an early push was for the Red Aristocracy to advocate privilege according to birth.

Somehow I have the impression that Red Guard publications sprouted all over China, but for the biggest most dominant city's best high school to have its best student take seriously the slogans and delegated authority from Mao himself to lead the ideological battle of the day would have been merely the most poetic and perfect realization of Mao's call. It was a case of the right place at the right time.

They unfortunately had the wrong political idea but bravely or foolishly published it, asserting the principle: All people are equal.

Although Mao may not himself have known the name, Zhijing Mou, he definitely knew of this paper, according to George, who claims that all of China could talk of nothing else, for much of 1966-67. He says it can be found on the internet today, as well as even this week, lamentations about What happens to those who speak the truth honestly, they end up like Zhijing Mou, mentioning him by name. Check out this Google search for "Zhijing" Mou Red Guard.

Of course, the idea that all people are created equal is anathema to the Party because Party members are more equal than others, certainly more equal than counterrevolutionaries, capitalists, and as we will observe, independent thinkers including those idealistically seeking the betterment of the world. Soon, therefore, police were interrogating George's friends who all denied that they had written anything or had any relations with the paper. Then they knocked on George's door. George said that many years later he read his files in the police archives regarding this encounter. In that interrogation, George claimed that he was the sole author of all the articles, that none of his friends had anything to do with it, and it was all him, his sole action and responsibility. The file said that the police therefore considered George to be a lunatic and decided to let him go, quite free. Do lunacy, independent mindedness, and harmlessness go together?

Perhaps as a result of the shutdown of his newspaper and the Party's assertion of authority in these matters, George's idealism was shocked and he felt to sacrifice his life for the socialist ideal was no longer possible through newspapers or politics, so he decided the best way to do it was to go and fight the Americans in the Viet Nam war. He took a train to the southern corner of China, and walked across the mountains into Viet Nam, in order to join their army and fight for the betterment of mankind. Unfortunately, he was captured (I'm not sure if by the Chinese or Vietnamese authorities), who decided he must be stopped and sent him home. I will say the world did find a way to better itself at that moment.

Some time later as part of the Cultural Revolution all the schools were shut down, and all the students were required to go to the countryside for re-education. George was shipped to the far west of China to a village whose name I could not pronounce if I could remember it, where he spent in all around 10 years in the most primitive conditions; George described it was living in the Stone Age. However, there must have been pencils and paper, which perhaps he brought along with his books, including at least calculus and English, as well as his own native spirit and love of learning. When I visited his Seattle apartment, he said in the other room there were three foot-tall stacks of thin papers on which he had written all his homework during that time. Alone and teacherless in the candlelight, for at least two years intensively during that time, he deeply studied and thoroughly conquered his subjects, as evidence for which, George confidently speaks and writes math papers in English, even today. Imagine doing that from a stone hut in far rural China in the 1970's. If you are reading George's papers, there is a lesson there, which is, if you don't understand something, keep working at it persistently and patiently, until you do, because the truth is in there and it will eventually come out.

Eventually the Cultural Revolution was over, and the schools were reopened. George went back to Beijing, and took the college entrance examination, in which he had one of the top few scores in the country. Without taking a class, he took the graduate school entrance examination, in which he had one of the top few scores in the Beijing district, and enrolled directly in graduate school, skipping the entire undergraduate program which, you might say, he had already completed on his own. His master's degree from that time was in Electrical Engineering, from a school with a ridiculous name, he said. He also did research in other fields, do I recall chemistry and physics among them? But I will say that the field of Electrical Engineering, which has many angles on the word "bit" from the digital electronics layer to the mathematics of Shannon's Information Theory, was an excellent foundation for George's later work, which elaborates the concept of the bit into many areas which I never imagined.

Then he applied to the Yale University PhD Computer Science program, and was accepted. Apparently the admissions committee was competent. By now, George was committed to betterment of mankind through ideas, especially powerful, technically significant ideas, with mathematical properties and consequences and with wide scope of application. In the late 1980's he at Yale and I at Penn did our PhDs in adjacent programs, his was really mathematical computer science in the theory of programming languages, mine was linguistics; he graduated in 1990 and I graduated a year later in 1991; he went to Brandeis with a real job, I went to Stanford with a 2-year postdoc. Of his 10 peers getting PhDs in his class at Yale, noone got any job offers, except George who got 7. He taught at Brandeis, consulted for various companies, did lots of obscure research, applying simple but deep and powerful ideas to hard problems. I have a few stories of his later years. In one, he taught the CEO, CTO, and technical staff at Thinking Machines that they had wasted their startup money and only slowed their machines down by a factor of 10, because log(32768) >> sqrt(32768) by about ~10x. Told better here.) In another, he gave a talk at IBM with slides entitled Why You Are Wrong. After the talk, the IBM staff said We will get back to you on why You are wrong. After two weeks they got back to him and offered him a job as the Director of their laboratory.

In another, he showed his DST algorithm working over the internet from Seattle to China on a smartphone to a senior engineer at Amazon. The task is, given a polygon (drawn by a forefinger) on a map on a screen, extract all the matching points of interest from a database of 20 million POIs in <20ms. Coffee shops? Draw with your finger, before you know it, there they are. See, geographic and spatial search require linear search through the 20M POIs, otherwise how can you tell, for each one, if it is within your fat-fingered polygon? But George's DST approach does it in log(N), perhaps even constant, time. The Amazon engineer said, How did you do that? He couldn't believe it.

You know, generally people don't understand George's work. I think it's because he doesn't supply enough examples and enough redundant triangulateable intepretations for readers who don't have the same presumptions and mental models to begin to grasp and finally to see the meaning and the generality of his point. It is in there, but it is mathematical and non-redundant. George likes to tell me, Tom, you are bringing in irrelevant dimensions. If the bit is a voltage on a copper wire versus an aluminum wire that doesn't matter. About half of our conversations consist in George patiently repeating this lesson. Apparently I can't, but will you, please, get it?!

Also, George says, if you state an algorithm while requiring unnecessary conditions, you have made a mistake. An algorithm should be stated at the proper level of generalization, and should not include unnecessary restrictions. For example today he said NVidia's discussion of the scan algorithm was wrong, because either it said scan uses a binary operator that is commutative and associative, or it said it uses a binary operator. In fact scan requires an associative binary operator (reordering of the operations is allowed), while commutativity is not required (reordering of the data or operand sequence will not occur, so operand-order-sensitivity is allowed). Therefore stating the algorithm as restricted to commutative binary operators is wrong, and failing to state that it is restricted to associative binary operators is wrong. State nothing irrelevant, but you must state what is relevant and true.

Recent Years

George and I met at the Green Lake Table Tennis Center in about 2011, where I was an extroverted and friendly welcomer to newcomers. I greeted him, and asked about him, and learned he had an amazing story, not least of which was that as a theoretical computer scientist he had some ideas he hoped the world would make use of. It was the Dimensional Shuffle Transform or DST, which is a component of a spatial mapping and search system for efficient spatial search. (See his patents.) I developing speech recognition based applications at a venture capital funded company at the time which was just starting up and working in the office of the venture capital fund in Bellevue which funded it. The company was called Spoken, the year 2011, the VCs were former Microsoft executives who talked merciless business. I thought they might listen if I asked him to come talk to them; he came, they couldn't understand a person with an algorithm rather than a business plan, so that conversation went nowhere; my fault. I visited his home after that, also in Bellevue, and lost track of him soon after that.

George got head-hunted back to China and went there to seek uptake for his ideas; he taught for three years at Xiamen University, where the historic and famous poet Lu Xun went to school in the 1920's, after XMU wanted to bring overseas Chinese talent home to where they would be better appreciated. In 2018 or so, before the Covid pandemic, George came back. Eventually we reconnected, and I have been excitedly learning from him ever since. We meet for coffee or lunch periodically, and he corrects my understanding.

Teaching / Learning Style

Today we met and I explained my two teacher-student protocols which I learned from my mother the chemistry teacher, and from the plumber's apprenticeship which I completed 8 years ago.

With Mom, the student displays everything they understand by describing the issue and solution, the teacher observes what is correct and what is incorrect in the student's display, and needs to correct only the subset which is incorrect, thus the communication is efficient and steps learned are confirmed.

With the plumbers, any utterance by the student is taken as asserting superior knowledge and authority by the student over the teacher, and thus is understood as hostile, demeaning, and arrogant. Therefore the wise plumbing student keeps his mouth shut and watches, keeping his concepts and their refinements to himself, but doing all assigned tasks happily and happily accepting correction whenever given. Thus communication is inefficient but the emotional environment between teacher and student is not disruptive.

After hearing this, George said, the ideal student will say, here's one way to do a certain thing, is there a better way?

	Your thoughts?
Name+:
Email*:	(will not be shared or abused)
Comment:
	Feedback is welcome.