Conference Report

I finally have a chance to report from the conference.

First, it seems the 'bait-and-switch' situation with the paper seems that reality was strongly encouraging of a paper rather than requiring one. This isn't a huge change, but I definitely misinterpreted the wording in an e-mail about this. Of course, I've now gone through a huge amount of effort, though I will need to shorten my paper substantially to stay within the strict limit (which has thankfully been changed from 5 pages, 12 point to 6 pages, 10 point). I think my paper is something like 10.5 pages, 10 point. My current plans are to keep the longer version on my website and cite that paper at appropriate points during the shorter paper, which will be both on my website and in the conference proceedings. I'm not sure what to get rid of in general, but I can make some of the details web-only. Despite my confusion, I'm happy that I wrote the paper because it forced me to focus my thoughts on these issues, and I expect this will help during some facets of my job interviews. (It's unfortunate I fell further behind on other things as a result, but that's the way it goes.)

I mentioned the NSA in a brief hint regarding some of the contents of this entry. This workshop was sponsored by both the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the NSA. The NSA sponsors a lot of the mathematics REUs in the country and has a huge vested interest in producing more people trained in mathematics, as this group is the primary talent pool from which they recruit. Hence, they benefit from more mathematics Ph.D.s, Masters, and Bachelors. There is no required internship or anything else potentially insidious; it is merely a long-term and very sensible and intelligent investment on their part.

A couple of my friends attended this conference, which was helpful in keeping me in conversations. (During dinner the first night, one of them made me join his table because otherwise it looked like there was going to be a Table Of Shame. "That's what friends are for.") In fact, between those two, one of the co-organizers of the conference (who left Cornell's Center for Applied Math about a couple weeks before I arrived), and me, we had four alums of the graduate program I was in. There was also a Cornell math alum who overlapped with us who I had met during graduate school, but we never really knew each other and we don't talk to each other when we attend the same conference. The conference organizer in question turned out to be the person who translated one of the AMS Mathematical Moments about my stuff into Spanish. (This was the one about celestial mechanics that cited my expository article as the reference.) In turn, she didn't know that I was the one who wrote that article. The Mathematical Moments from 2005 and earlier (including this one) were displayed at the small AMS booth as free glossy sheets. (I took a copy of the Spanish translation so that I could have a glossy version of it.) Two Moments---including the English version of this one---were mounted on cardboard to attract people to the handouts, so I got to bring my friends over and show them my handiwork. The 2006 one on Congress wasn't there (because there aren't yet any glossy printouts of the 2006 moments; there are 8 every year, and the complete set must be done first), so my other one wasn't at the display. Still, this is yet another reason for me to look forward to the January meeting in New Orleans, because then I'll have two of these promptly displayed at a much larger meeting where my primary purpose in going is for employment purposes. Basically, tons of people will be stopping by that booth and a reasonable subset of them will be seeing pointers to my work. (If I get a cardboard mock-up again, then the subset will be really high!) Moreover, I'm going to be giving a talk about the Congress work and 1-2 other talks (one is pending a decision on acceptance versus rejection, so we'll see about the third talk), so my name should be pretty visible at the meeting. While this publicity isn't as close to as wide as the CNN, Washington Post, etc stuff I've gotten before, it happens to be far more relevant to my job prospects because of how much more prominent it is among mathematicians (especially at that meeting).

Besides friends, there were also a lot of colleagues here who I know. Plus, there were a couple people I had met before (for example, from a short interview at the Joint Math Meetings 2 years ago that didn't lead to a campus invite; actually, in that case I was pretty sure it was the same person and I ended up being correct) but not realized until later in the meeting. (Naturally, they remembered me because I'm just awesome that way.) I met a couple people with whom I had corresponded and (though it was not my purpose in attending the meeting) got a chance to talk to some very relevant people for the current job search. There aren't too many faculty from Ph.D.-granting institutions at a conference like this, but those who are there are far less busy than they are at a research conference---it's a different group of people whose time is in the most demand at this sort of conference---and we share an obvious common interest in mentoring by virtue of being at this conference. So while fewer of these people are here, it is in many senses easier to get a given person's attention.

I also got the chance to meet a few people from teaching schools, including one person with whom I had exchanged e-mails (about my upcoming math colloquium at the Claremont Colleges). (By the way, I got an e-mail that my colloquium invite at UCLA officially came through, so that's my big chance to impress them and hopefully encourage them to interview me officially.)

I was a scribe for one of the sessions. (I had been asked to do this just before the conference.) I narrowly got out of a bait-and-switch, and the only reason I did was that somebody else specifically wanted to write the article encompassing the theme of our session. I'm still going to read their draft and give comments, but I am very happy for somebody else to be doing the work! (And two people really wanted to write it, so I was very pleased to be asked if they could do it instead.)

For Thursday night's dinner, I was at a table which 5 of us in total, so we were about 50 % seating capacity, so the conversation was perhaps not as lively as it might have been. It wasn't bad, but it was just subdued. Some of the desserts were awesome! Mini chocolate mousse cups... Yum!

Friday night's dinner was the interesting one. The precursor was the four of us from CAM and a professor at Tulane (who the others knew but I hadn't yet met before though I knew who he was and recognized him by face; he's an APPLIED mathematician like me) hanging out between the end of the last session of the day and the beginning of dinner. We were in the hotel bar---I still owe this guy about $2.50 for my Shirley Temple; I didn't have any cash with me---and were just shooting the breeze. When he spoke, this guy had made fun of a previous speaker in an absolutely wonderful manner (there had been a bit of a self-congratulatory pure >> applied math mindset behind one of his comments in the talk that rubbed some of us the wrong way), which we then kept referencing in an increasingly meta- way through that conversation, dinner, and beyond. People kept bring up contributions of size epsilon, and this culminated later in the evening when somebody was discussing his size-epsilon contribution and I then assured him (in complete deadpan, of course) that it was actually size sqrt(epsilon). This comment (which occurred at the hotel bar after dinner) was the second version of the joke I had used last night, but it was far better than the first version.

OK, so the five of us started a table, and we were joined by a few other people, including the professor from William & Mary who I met at the Atlanta conference two years ago and one of the high-ranking NSA math people who was attending the conference. We clearly established ourselves as the fun table that evening. (This entire dinner conversation was really fun. I felt really comfortable, although it started because critical mass had been achieved from the beginning. Critical mass is so important for me.) We were shooting the breeze in general, and at some point the topic turned briefly to politics. I made a couple of comments before I could stop myself, and in fact I was worse than usual in terms of the frequency of my tactless comments. I was thinking about the conversation on Gazebo's blog about fleeing the country because of the current political climate (the fact we no longer have habeus corpus, etc), so I was bringing up leaving the country to move to places that are better, more democratic, more tolerant of people with my beliefs, etc. Then I realized that the high-ranking NSA person was sitting next to me, although this person is a mathematician so it was technically ok. Nevertheless, I don't think this wasn't my best move and I now can say for the rest of my life that I (facetiously) discussed my possible need to flee the country with a high-ranking NSA official. How cool is that as a line on my resume of brilliant comments?!?

The asperger's/autism conversation occurred shortly after my string of tactless remarks (specifically, after I said that I was in rare form that night and those who know me well and already knew how blunt I can be agreed with me), and the NSA person quickly figured out that I probably had that a bit and from that point basically proceeded to good-naturedly pick on me for the rest of the dinner. Once this started, my friends from graduate school brought up the fact that they always made sure to keep prospective graduate students away from me so that I wouldn't scare them from going to Cornell. (I already knew that this had been done because of my blunt honesty.) I did, however, defend myself vehemently on a particular aspect of it---my goal when talking to prospectives is not to recruit them to my school but rather to give them any relevant information I could provide in order for them to make the most informed decision possible regardless of whether or not that meant attending Cornell. I'm not a recruiting monkey; the most valuable service by far that I can offer prospective students is to be honest with them and (to name specific examples things I said) if that means giving the names of professors in their research area in another school that accepted them (to make sure they talked to them when they visited that school) and saying not only what I liked about Cornell but also what I didn't like (including if I thought a particular person wasn't a good advisor) than so be it. These people shouldn't go to a place and be surprised---I was given the argument that they can find out after they decide to matriculate---they have the right to know this kind of information before they make a decision if it's in my power to provide them such information (obviously, with the understanding that it's just my opinion and that I'm speaking only for myself). It was a lighthearted conversation and all in good fun, but I stated very explicitly that I refused to apologize for my actions. I stand by them and I would do the same thing again. (That said, I also understand why the people in the program collectively tried to keep the prospectives away from me. Except they didn't bother keeping Melvin Leok '00 away from me when he visited once they found out he had known me four 4 years because they figured he already knew what he was getting into by talking to me.) Anyway, this is coming out as a rant, but I just want it to be an explanation. It was a fun conversation (including this part).

Also, our table had been laughing so hard all night and obviously having a lot of fun that a couple others a large subset of us knew came to the table and joined us. We stayed something like an hour or more after all the food had been cleared and then a few of us went back to the bar to shoot the breeze some more. One person (who had not been with us at dinner) joined us and actually remarked how tactful I was after one specific comment of mine. The rest of us were extremely amused by this. We ended up staying until we got kicked out because the hotel people needed to lock up. I was already extremely sleep-deprived when I started the day, but I nevertheless went to bed at 1 am despite needing to get up at 7am this morning. (You can image how tired I am right now, and yet tonight I am staying up late doing some work, reading lots of baseball, reading blogs, and blogging. I will crash soon, though; my present energetic state is a very artificial one.)

I continued my tactful presence this morning. There was one session in which an audience member raised a point with which I completely disagreed---he basically said that math grad students have to deal with things like quals and grad students in the experimental sciences have much less stress because they don't. What!?!?! How did this guy get that idea? They're just tested on different subjects. Hello? McFly? Anybody home? While in line for lunch after the session, the CAM alum who helped organize the conference said she expected me to comment at that point (because I always stress that I view math as just another science rather than something separate from the rest, as most mathematicians would have us believe) and was very surprised that I didn't. My response was that I didn't because it wasn't that guy's main point and I didn't want to sidetrack the conversation. (OK, so now you're thinking that I'm capable of showing restraint. Stay tuned...) I then said that she was absolutely correct that I felt the guy was completely full of crap. (I definitely used the term "full of crap;" the 'completely' may not have been there.) We were in line for lunch, so lots of others heard this (i.e., it's not like we were sitting around the bar), and then after a minute I noticed the guy who made that comment was not too far away. I'm guessing that he heard me, though I don't actually know. (It's a good thing he's not at a school where I want to get a job.)

One last thing (unless I remember something else later)... the hotel's background music was pretty cool much of the time. They were playing mostly world music, including some klezmer music (which constitutes a lot of what my parents listen to because it's traditional music from the old country, so I heard that stuff a lot while growing up; some of it is very catchy) and a metric ton of bossa nova. This included pseudo bossa-nova cover of Hotel Calfornia, though I had a hankering for the version by the Gypsy Kings. It also included some songs by bands that have been heavily influenced by world music; in particular, I caught two songs by The Talking Heads. The whole bossa nova thing got me thinking that I would be curious to hear a version of Monster Mash by Bossa Nova Frankenstein, should such a band or person ever exist.

OK, time to move on to a final couple baseball articles and then sleep. My flight tomorrow is something like noon, so I will have to set my alarm for tomorrow morning.