Academic stuff from the SIAM Meeting

I'll delay my review of A Scanner Darkly for a day or so and finish off my conference blog entries.

I co-organized a pair of sessions on Bose-Einstein condensates. We had talks about theory, numerics, and experiments, and hopefully some collaborative efforts will eventually result from some of the discussions we had. I gave a talk on my stuff as part of this pair of sessions, but I had been awake for 24 hours and I wasn't as coherent as I wanted to be.

I gave a second talk at the meeting---on Friday in a data mining and signal processing session. I spoke about Congress, and I had the advantage that the person right before me was awful. The talks in that session were 15 minutes (+ 5 for questions). He had 33 slides that were absolutely loaded with theorems and equations. There was far more stuff in there than one could put in a full hour's talk, so it was really a perfect example of what not to do. I wish my students were there to see it.

Because this meeting was joint with the PDE one, there are tons of people who I knew. I didn't have a chance to talk to all of them, but I was constantly seeing people I knew (some of them important, others peons like me).

My NSF program manager (for my grant proposal) made it a point to come up to me and tell me exactly what I needed to fix to cross from epsilon below the award threshhold (which is where I was this year) to above it. Obviously, there are no guarantees, but he went out of his way to give me explicit information beyond what was in the written reports, and I appreciated this a great deal. It was above and beyond the call of duty, and he increased the (already significant) amount of respect I had for him.

I had some discussions with a quantum chaos person I had met a few years ago. (I knew he'd be at the conference.) I had been communicating with him because of some projects a couple of my students are doing this summer, so we had a nice long chat.

I was told that I apparently came extremely close to being offered the UC Davis job during the 04-05 season. (I was also told they were going to advertise, that I should apply, and e-mail the person in question when I did.) I wasn't planning to broach the subject, but I was very glad to receive the info. In terms of just missing, the difference is small when viewed microscopically but extremely large macroscopically. (This phrasing is correct when using the physics/applied math meaning of those terms. Think of two things that score 1.21111 versus 1.21110, which leads to "macroscopic" rankings of 1 and 2.) I also found out that I likely would have gotten the SMU job had I not needed to defer for one year to be a postdoc at Tech. (Then I could have seen them construct W's presidential library firsthand...)

Anyway, there were other academic things. I kept in touch with a prominent popular math freelance writer (who was a Scurve from back in the day). This is who I would contact if I ended up going in that direction. He'll be visiting Pasadena in mid September, so I'm going to try to get him to talk to the California Tech people who are in town at that time.

I think there's some more I could mention, but I'll stop here.