Soaking up the atmosphere

There are a couple aspects of this.

One is simply walking through the old streets to just see what's up. I had a chance to do this mostly in my Monday evening wanderings, during which I could better appreciate the cool atmosphere and learn how difficult it can be to navigate streets that aren't arrayed via the x- and y-axes and whose names change at almost every intersection. (Of course, I really wish there were more coffee and dessert places, especially ones open late. That's a part of my daily life that I really like---just to sit down in a cafe and read or even do work.) Walking through St. John's College also revealed very cool architecture. I haven't gone into any of the other Colleges yet, but we have our conference banquet in Trinity Hall tonight, so at least I'll get to add one more. (We have no breaks during the day unless one skips talks, so I won't be walking through the other Colleges on this trip.)

The other aspect is the incredibly long, rich tradition of applied mathematics at Cambridge. Just to say I was here where so many of the pioneering studies in the foundations of my own discipline were made is awesome. There is an extent to which one can get this at some of the best US universities, but here the difference is not just in the brightness of the achievements but also in the sheer quantity and breadth of them over a very long time (and of course, the really old school ones). The applied mathematicians lised on the Cambridge website are Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Babbage, Stokes, Larmor, Rayleigh, Eddington, Dirac, GI Taylor, Sir Harold Jeffreys Sir James Lighthill, and Stephen Hawking. That's really an incredible list of names. And unlike in the US system, England is full of departments of applied mathematics and theoretical physics (and others similarly titled) reflecting the concomitant nature of research in these areas that people of my academic stripe stress.