More is less
The architect Mies van der Rohe is famous for promoting the slogan “less is more.” But if Venkat Chandrasekaran, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, had a slogan for his own work, it might be “more is less.”Science, engineering and other quantitative disciplines are largely concerned with uncovering the mathematical relationships between data points — such as energies of molecules, measurements of temperature or gene activity, or stock prices. In most cases, adding more data points just makes the math more complicated. But sometimes it makes it simpler. And for many types of calculations, if there are additional data points that will make them simpler, Chandrasekaran’s techniques will find them.To see how adding data points can mean simpler calculations, suppose that you’re trying to understand the relationships between a bunch of stocks in the same industry sector — say, Apple, Gateway, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and...