More from the Joint Math Meetings

I have a bit of time at the moment before a 1:30 meeting and I've dealt with various urgent e-mails the best that I can before tomorrow's work day starts in Oxford, so here's some more of the promised blogging.

In the 'about bloody time' department is SIAM's new journal dedicated to undergraduate research and exposition intended for undergraduates. I heard rumors about something like this a few years ago (though in a slightly different form than what ultimately came to pass), and I'm very pleased that it's finally here. It is long overdue. Hopefully, it will be as effective as I think it can be.

I gave my two talks. On Monday, I discussed social networks as a vehicle for teaching computational linear algebra. My perspective is based on two theses: (1) No student should get a bachelors in mathematics without having at least some computational algebra; and (2) students taking linear algebra think that it is a dead subject rather than a vibrant one. Basically, we should exploit the ubiquity of things like Google and Facebook and the fact that such things from everybody life can give students relevant intuition. If they become better at web stalking as a result, so much the better! (By the way, I should mention that Oxford fails on this count because our math majors seem to hardly see any numerics at all before they graduate, let alone some of the specific things they ought to see. It's pretty atrocious, actually. I hope this can be changed.) As a result of this talk, I basically got an offer to write another book in addition to the one I have planned about mathematics and sports. I didn't sign a contract yet, but the publisher is planning to send me free copies of a couple of their graph theory books in the relevant series (which I am certainly interested in having!) so that I can see examples of other books they've published. My talk yesterday concerned nonlinear waves in granular lattices (a.k.a., chains of beads). It went pretty well, though half the audience of our session skipped my talk and the one immediately before it so that they could go see Terry Tao give a very abstract talk about stability of solitons in the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. I certainly don't blame them---he's rather famous and these recent results are quite important---but it was absolutely retarded of the conference organizers to schedule a plenary talk about solitons at the same time as a session that is devoted predominantly to solitons. Whose idea was this?

On Monday, I saw an absolutely fabulous talk by Robert Lang about mathematics and origami. Lang is a Caltech alum (he was a Scurve) and is officially a laser physicist by vocation, but he's also one of the foremost researchers and practitioners of origami.

Another interesting thing I saw on Monday was a set of short mathematically-oriented comedy plays that were written and performed by some of the conference attendees. A couple of them were actually pretty good, though the first couple (especially the second one) dragged on. I'm glad that I stayed for the better ones.

I'll have a little more to write later.