Techers at SIAM Annual Meeting (and Cornell people too)

I always see several Techers from my era at the APS March Meeting, which is absolutely huge. I occasionally see one or maybe two (typically one) at other meetings, such as the SIAM Annual Meeting, which are still big (around 1000 people for this one), but nowhere near the size of the March Meeting.

Besides me, attending this meeting were Lloydies Melvin Leok '00, Damian Burch '00, and Emily (Jennings) Evans (who was a Lloydie in my class, but transferred). Scurve Richard Yeh '98 (but originally part of '97) was also at the meeting. He overlapped with me at Cornell as well---he was in the physics department there---and I have seen him at a couple different March Meetings as well. I see Melvin at 1-2 conferences every year because we have some reasonably overlapping research interests. (We've even spoken in the same session once before.)

There were also Techers from other eras at the meeting. It turns out that one of the speakers I invited for my session was an undergrad at Tech (maybe I knew before but forgot?) and also a Lloydie. This was Chandra Raman '90, who I know because he's a physics professor at Georgia Tech. I knew before the conference that Darb Jared Bronski '89 would be there. (He works on problems in nonlinear waves as well, and I pick his brain from time to time.) There was also a current Caltech undergrad, who I assume Tim knows because she did a SURF under Oscar Bruno. (Let it be known that once in a life, a girl walked up to me to start a conversation because I had Caltech on my name tag. While this has no actual significance, I'm making this remark now because it will probably be a long time before this happens again.)

One recently-graduated grad turkey (Laurent Demanent, Ph.D. 2006) was also there. I believe there were only three of us at the meeting who currently hail from Caltech.

If I am allowed to go back in time further, I'm sure there were plenty of older Techers there. Two of them are Cleve Moler (the inventor of Matlab) and Alejandro Aceves (who is a professor at University of New Mexico and got his Masters in applied math at Tech back in the day). Aceves is a nonlinear optics person, so I had a chance to keep him updated on my current work. (I have recently started doing some stuff in nonlinear optics, so he was very interested to hear about that.)

I also saw a couple Techers who weren't attending the meeting. I had dinner with Jit Kee Chin '01 on Tuesday night and Melvin, Damian, Joe Blitztein '99, and me went to lunch on Thursday. (Joe, who I hadn't seen since 1999, was there searching for an apartment. He has been hired as a tenure-track professor in statistics at Harvard, which is pretty damn impressive. I hadn't previously realized this, but people in statistics don't need to do postdocs. That's quite a bit different from my fields...) On Thursday, I had a meeting with alum Kelly Beatty (some year a long time ago), an editor (the editor in chief?) of Sky & Telescope. He is helping out with some stuff for the Legends III book, which is currently slated to appear in May 2007. (Yes, we have gotten several extensions on this project.)

Unsurprisingly, there were also two Cornell applied math people from my era at the conference. I met up with a third (not attending the meeting) Wednesday at lunch.

In a future entry, I'll discuss some of the academic stuff and mention the "display only" croissants I saw in the Dallas airport.