Peter’s Face

Mathematics is not about numbers, equations, computations, or algorithms: it is about understanding—Bill Thurston.

Peter Weinberger is a computer scientist who is famous for many things—including his face. His name “Peter” alone stands for “rock or stone”. He did great work at Bell Labs, where he was part of the team that created the AWK Programming Language: the others were Alfred Aho and Brian Kernighan.

I just saw him, after a few years, at Bob Sedgewick’s retirement event in Princeton.

His Face

Peter’s face comes up in Bell Lab’s lure: For some reason, the portrait of Peter Weinberger has always been our most popular target for picture editing experiments. It started a few years ago when Peter was raised to the rank of department head and was careless enough to leave a portrait of himself floating around. On a goofy Saturday evening at the lab, Rob Pike and I started making photocopies and, to emphasize Peter’s rise in the managerial hierarchy, prepared a chart of the Bell Labs Cabinet with his picture stuck in every available slot. Peter must have realized that the best he could do was not to react at all, if at least he wanted to avoid seeing his face 10 feet high on a watertower. Nevertheless, Peter’s picture appeared and reappeared in the most unlikely places in the lab.

Experiments

Peter’s research over the years has been, I believe, an interesting mixture of theory and practice. Early on he did experimental work in deep number theory. For example his paper with Daniel Shanks refuted an open conjecture. This work is an interesting blend of computations and theory. One of the surprises of deep number theory is that shocks abound in the fine structure of number fields. This structure is not always straightforward and often depends on examples and counterexamples.

Crypto

Peter also worked with the US government in classified ways. He is part of Jason’s group. For example you can see some of his work on the evaluation of research directions:

1. DNA: one of my favorite.
2. Quantum.
3. Medical Imaging.

Other parts of it are classified and

Renaissance and Google

Renaissance Technologies is an American hedge fund based on Long Island. The firm is regarded as the most successful hedge fund in the world. Weinberger was the chief technology officer at Renaissance until he left for Google in 2003. This exit made sense since Peter seems to love problems in infrastructure and security. Working to solve infrastructure problems at the global scale at Google was clearly a compelling opportunity for him.

Below is an excerpt from a talk with Peter and Laurianne Mclaughlin:

Peter Weinberger, New York City, 2015

Weinberger: I’m a software engineer. I write programs, infrastructure stuff mostly. I’m working on tools for processing various kinds of logs created by internal software. I’m not working on security directly, but a lot of what we do is affected by security and privacy concerns. As a result of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, most companies now create a lot of logs to verify what code they’re running, and [show] how people work with internal data.

Also, I spend a lot of time reading code. At Google, you can’t check in code without it being reviewed and approved by a peer, so if you work with productive people, there’s a lot of code to review.

LM: What are the biggest technology challenges for Google today?

Weinberger: Scale is the problem. Our business grows rapidly. That means every year, a lot of the technology decisions made a year ago don’t look so good any more. Exponential growth is a very pleasant problem but requires a lot of work.

LM: What are your technology pet peeves?

Weinberger: I’m sure I’ve got dozens. Password management. Sometimes people, like auditors, think users should regularly change passwords. I think this just encourages people to use crummy passwords—because either they have to write the passwords down, or they need a sequence of passwords that are very similar.

One of my other pet peeves here is curious error messages. A lot of them are still awful. They start with the word “abort” but the program continues. We have a lot of legacy software, and you end up with these situations where an error message pops up, but the computer keeps on going. Deep in the software something went wrong, and reports it, but you’re seven levels of abstraction away, and it’s just useless noise.

Open Problems

Peter is still working on his problems. We wish him well on solving them and on all he is doing.