What I've learned while in Seattle (so far)

This is also a partial list subject to the finiteness of my memory. In the spirit of the present conference, think of it as taking a finite-dimensional truncation of an infinite-dimensional Hill matrix. :)


I should have brought my camera. There is some really pretty scenery that begs to have its photo taken (and I wouldn't even have to pay any money to do it).

Seattle is very liberal and reminds me of Portland (very open recreational drug use, "hip", lots of young people, etc.) I had heard this before (except for the Portland comparison), but it's different seeing it by oneself.

Seattle seems to have a pretty large Asian population.

There are lots of coffee places here. (Again, I knew about this before.) There is also a spiffy bubble tea place with nice places to sit and read. (Their espresso machine was off last night and seems to be a day-only thing, but my green apple shake [hold the tapioca] was really good.)

September is the best time of year to visit Seattle. Starting in a month or so, it will apparently be dark and gloomy for several months. I was quite glad to get away from Pasadena's current weather, although my understanding is that it was slated to have let up by now.

We spent most of the three days of the workshop looking at the properties of eigenvalues in the complex plane. The workshop is on stability so I knew this was going to happen, but enough is about enough! I've had it with these motherfucking eigenvalues on this motherfucking plane!

Thus far, one speaker has referenced SoaP, although it had nothing to do with the comment above. (He was referring to a piece of in-progress Matlab software of his called "Stablab" and he was mentioning he had to keep the name because of all the jokes that have come out of it.) Nimble dodge!

"Uniform convergence is for school-girls!" (A U Dub grad student was mentioning how somebody asked a famous applied mathematician -- Jerry Kevorkian -- teaching one of his classes about whether a series he had written down converged uniformly. Kevorkian turned around and said this in New York-ese. I am getting hazy---it might have been 'uniform continuity,' but uniform convergence makes more sense because the context this should be is with asymptotic series, which are often extremely useful even though they diverge wildly. Pure mathematicians can't stand it when APPLIED mathematicians do that stuff without also looking at error bounds and convergence issues, and Kevorkian is definitely one of the APPLIED folks. (The attitude, which I support, is to do whatever it takes to solve the scientific problem even if that means that rigor has to be sacrified. I am very glad that other people who like to fill in these details are around because it certainly has been known to find errors in more 'formal' [by which mathematicians mean informal or, more precisely, 'not completely rigorous'...] methods, but that's not my bag, baby.)

The bathroom on the 2nd floor of the "European-style hotel" (aka, dorm) at which I'm staying has an awesome-looking moth living in it.

People are better at remembering me than I am at remembering them. (OK, this was a reminder rather than something new.) This include professors to whom it is useful for me to kiss up.

I am considered useful by some people: Two people (both postdocs) were informed prior to the conference by professors not attending the conference that I would be here and at least one of them implied that I was a useful person to whom to talk. (Hah! I fooled him!) I had definitely met one of them before and may have met the other before. (In the last case, I remember a paper the guy wrote but it was long and looked intimidating to read. He is speaking in the session I'm chairing, so this will give me a good chance to pick his brain further and save myself some work as concerns learning about his paper, which looked exceptionally interesting based on a quick glance.)

One of the U Dub grad students has the shirt with Vader and his Death-Star foliage. (I think his other shirts may also have been purchased from the same web site because the style seemed right.)

One of my collaborators, when asked by his postdoc (not one of the other two) how he should write a research and teaching statement, answered that he should go look at mine. Again, I'm honored, but I haven't exactly parlayed these into a tenure-track job. (Then again, I have parlayed them into several good interviews, which I may or may not have blown---one can ace them and still not get the job because there are loads of factors involved---so maybe that is the part of my job quest that might be worth using as a model.)

I have been advised to remove the link from my main website to my blog during interview season so that the people interviewing me don't see it when they google me; this is probably because blogging makes me evil.

Facebook can actually be useful. Today (well, early this morning, but I was asleep at the time) I received a friend request from a friend (from Page, actually) I hadn't heard from in something like 4-5 years. Awesome! (She's class of '00, so some of you might have met her. She dropped by occasionally during the first term of my senior year because she was also taking the genetics course I was in.) She's still in the LA area, so I'll try to get her to come to a gaming night (though I don't actually know if she games).

I have a couple things to which I can look forward when I get back in town. Well, I'm cheating here because I knew this before I left.