Cruddas and Kibasi Want Me to Waste My Talents

"Look at Switzerland", a friend told me. "They've been considering a Universal Basic Income." I'd been telling her my frustration at not being able to find money to carry out some educational projects in art and maths.

One of these is about teaching a branch of mathematics, important in physics and cosmology — and in designing reliable computer programs, hence everything from phones to driverless cars. The maths is called category theory, and because it's very abstract, it's hard to learn. I've written interactive Web pages for the Institute of Fiscal Studies and other organisations. I used that experience to make interactive pages on my Web site which demonstrate category theory using automatically-generated examples. Students can pull these apart and watch how they work, getting the same kind of insight as you would if you pulled apart a working model of a car engine or a steam train. When I showed mathematicians my demonstrations, I got lovely comments. The mathematical physicist John Baez wrote "I applaud your Java applets, Jocelyn! This is the sort of thing where it's very easy for mathematician so dream big — but only a few brave people dare to actually do something."

But those comments were the high point. All thereafter was depression. I'd built the demonstrations in my own time, hoping I'd be able to find funding to finish and extend them. Could I? Could I hell. So I've had to abandon something that excellent mathematicians tell me is valuable, and that my rare combination of skills — in category theory, and in interactive Web sites — few other people could do.

Another lost project was helping people learn to draw, using insights from computer graphics. There's lots of recent graphics research into writing programs that make line drawings of objects. That's difficult, because it's hard to know where to draw lines inside surfaces to suggest how they curve. Artists spend years learning this — for some reason, art books rarely explain it. But computers need precise instructions, so the graphics people have been forced to work out explicit rules about where to draw these lines. Translating the rules from mathematics to English would be a valuable piece of science popularisation. It would help artists learn line drawing quickly. I want to do it.

These are the things I would do if my income were taken care of. Much more than the work I do merely to afford food and housing, they would be a joy and a moral stimulation.