#graduate research
So, for reasons [explained below the break*], it occurred to me that the deadline for submitting abstracts to the Joint Meetings is probably pretty soon (it is— September 26— so if you’re planning to submit, better get your ass in gear!). And while I was looking through the sessions, I was once again reminded why I flinging love the Joint Meetings.
Here are some actual titles of sessions— sessions!There will be multiple talks on these things!
- AMS Special Session on Set-theoretic Topology (Dedicated to Jack Porter in Honor of 50 Years of Dedicated Research)
- MAA Invited Paper Session on Quandle Questions
- EXCELLENT??
- Also:Alissa Crans giving an MAA Invited Address(!) on “Quintessential Quandle Queries”
And there’s a bunch of “mathematical practice” sessions
- MAA Session on Philosophy of Mathematics as Actually Practiced
- Short version for the unaware: there has recently been a growing trend in philosophy of mathematics to shift the discipline closer to studying the practices of professional mathematicians.
- This is basically everything I like about philosophy plus everything I like about anthropology/sociology (I’m really bad at distinguishing the two) thrown together into a big pot and seasoned liberally with modern math; delicious!
- AMS Special Session on Alternative Proofs in Mathematical Practice
- Besides just being generically interesting, the title of this session is based on the title of a book that came out recently (which is really darn expensive, sorry). So I’m interested to see how the session interacts with that.
- MAA Session on Good Math from Bad: Crackpots, Cranks, and Progress
- OH MY WORD
- YAAAASSSSSSSSS
- (If you thought i had forgotten about that post, LOL no. I’m gonna teach that class someday. Just you watch.)
Also:
- AMS Special Session on Boundaries for Groups and Spaces
- this… has to be intentional, right?
- that’s the thing about this kind of math humor: you never know if the person was being clever, or if they’re just so far gone down the rabbit hole that they forget what words mean.
- under the assumption that it’s intentional, A+
- AMS Special Session on A Showcase of Number Theory at Liberal Arts Colleges
- This one’s a little subtle. If this were by the MAA, this would be whatever. But it’s not: it’s by the AMS. This is very outside the usual AMS fare and I’m hoping that it succeeds because that would indicate that at least one of teaching, undergrad research, and non-R1 research are being actively supported by both major American mathematical communities, which… fucking finally.
And then there are all the the sessions I’m excited about because people! Math friends!
- AMS Special Session on Research from the Rocky Mountain-Great Plains Graduate Research Workshop in Combinatorics
- AMS Special Session on Research in Mathematics by Early Career Graduate Students
- People like me except marginally better at not procrastinating? yes please?
- (Also it’s an AMS Special Session so there’s definitely some expectation of quality there… at least with the work. With the presentation style… we’ll see.)
- AMS Special Session on Special Functions and Combinatorics (in honor of Dennis Stanton’s 65th birthday)
- Oh shit that guy taught me combinatorics!
- Happy birthday Dennis! Whenever it happens to be!
- is there any polite way to ask when a professor’s birthday is?
anD SPEAKING OF PEOPLE:
- MAA Invited Address — Transforming Learning: Building Confidence and Community to Engage Students with Rigor by Maria Klawe
- ARE YOU KIDDING ME
- She is the president of my undergrad and that is the least of the many reasons I love her.
- MAA Project NExT Lecture on Teaching and Learning — Changing Mathematical Relationships and Mindsets: How All Students Can Succeed in Mathematics Learning by Jo Boaler
- NO FUCKING WAY
- Jo Boaler is a relentless advocate of IBL techniques in the K12 setting
- And in particular wrote What’s Math Got To Do With It? that book was my bible on math ed for a good three years, dam.
- AMS Invited Address — Algebraic Structures on Polytopes by Federico Ardilla
IS IT JANUARY YET?!?!?!
——
* So an idea I’ve had kicking around for a little while is that maybe I could try to take some of the lessons that I’ve learned from writing this blog and give a little contributed talk at the Joint Meetings this year. I’ve never really thought to do this earlier because it just doesn’t feel right to eat up a spot just to do some cheap advertisement. But I think I’m more comfortable with the idea now, since I’ll be several months out from writing the blog by then, and I don’t have a follow-up project planned. I mean, I do, it’s called “writing my damn thesis already”, but I haven’t figured out how to publicize that yet* :P
Part of the reason I want to do this is definitely because I’d love the blog to “count” for something CV-wise, and a contributed presentation at a conference isn’t much but it isn’t nothing.
But another reason is that over the course of my writing OTAM is that I’ve talked with a lot of people in real life who speak longingly about blogging. It’s something they’ve wanted to do for a while— maybe they even did do it for a month or two— but have never really found the time/drive/whatever. And I’ve never really had anything useful to say to comments like this. I think that the effort of preparing a conference talk might force me to straighten out my perspective on the value of this whole enterprise, which I think would allow me to have more meaningful conversations.
(This sounds rather falsely noble, but it’s also a bit self-serving: I suspect that I’ll find myself being one those people ten years from now, if not for blogging then for something else. It would be nice to have something of value to say to future-me, too.
[ * I thought pretty seriously about streaming thesis work. But in the end I came to the conclusion that I would need a much more flexible camera setup so that I could film my paper, or alternatively to get some kind of comfortable whiteboard setup in my room. The issue is that it’s easy to stream TeX, but I can’t do all my actual work in TeX; I need some flexibility to draw faster than I can TikZ. So I got myself a cheap tablet (and wow, that’s a story: ask me about it IRL sometime) thinking that I could get used to drawing on that. But in the end I really just couldn’t; I haven’t figured out how to think on the tablet the way I can think on paper or whiteboards**. I have no doubt that I could learn to do it, but I also have no particular interest in learning right now. ]
[ ** Unpopular opinion: chalkboards are great for teaching and giving talks, but when I do math that I have to actually think about, whiteboard every time. ]