Twenty Beautiful, Funky Buildings

These buildings are wonderful!

A Map of Every Building in America

Wow!

"A MAP OF EVERY
BUILDING IN AMERICA" RT @JenLucPiquant @jswatz: Here is the online version of the big, weird, fun thing I was telling you about yesterday... I loved working on this. https://t.co/loRUJhGJJo

— Marc Abrahams (@MarcAbrahams) October 12, 2018

A Drone's Eye View of Oxford's Mathematical Institute

The drone's tour of our building would have been much more realistic if it had gotten stuck inside an elevator.

Elevator Action

The elevator problems in Oxford's new Mathematical Institute have gotten so severe that one of the building's denizens has tried to come up with a helpful mathematical model of the problem... according to rumor, while actually stuck in the elevator...

We moved into the building at the boundary of August/September 2013. Is this really that hard to solve? I wonder what Arrowsmith would say about this problem?

(Tip of the cap to Philip Maini.)

Oxford's New Mathematical Institute (aka the "Andrew Wiles Building")

I just got back from a two-week trip to the US, and the stuff in my old office in Dartington House got moved into our shiny new building while I was gone.

We are going to have the official opening conference for the new building on 3 October.

The building is a bit of an eyesore from the outside, but the inside is excellent. There is one large visual kluge (where a walkway and an otherwise-nice architectural feature butt heads in a particularly grating manner), but the whole ambiance of an Escher-esque ant farm on the inside just works. (We are, of course, the ants.) There are a bunch of diagonal walkways within the floors and also diagonal vertical stairways and a very open feel. This will increase the chances of random encounters (and I expect many of them will be useful), though I'll need to be careful not to make a Bugs-Bunny-like wrong turn at OxPDE. :)

My office seems about twice as large as my old one, and I have tons more shelf space, a desk to facilitate meetings (finally!). Presumably, I also finally have working windows and blinds, and the Powers That Be could never manage to get either of those truly working properly in my almost 6 years in my old office. My office is also located strategically. For one thing, many of my lab members near it, and a restroom and both grayscale and color printers nearby. Moreover, when using a grayscale printer, I get to choose whether to use a printer that passes the offices of my lab members or one that does not... how very convenient :P ). Arguably even cooler than that is that my office is situated so that its entrance is just above one of the diagonal staircases. This will allow me to rain 'Death From Above' on people as they walk up and down the nearby staircase. (Now where are my red shells when I need them?) Truly, this building's layout would make one truly awesome arena for battle mode in a Mario Kart game. I will simply have to try to resist the urge to drop things on people as they are traversing the nearby staircase.

And, of course, there is the following extremely important fact: Once everybody has moved in, the mathematics department is going to be in one building (though a few stragglers will likely still be using an office elsewhere as their main office), and that is simply awesome! Most recently, we had been split over 4 different buildings (and we had gotten up to 5 at some point), so this consolidation will simplify things like having quick conversations with graph theorists without e-mailing back and forth to schedule something for a month later, etc. It's also very helpful for everybody that all of the support staff are now in the same building. Many of the ones with whom I dealt were in Dartington House (the building I was in) and quite a few things needed to be delivered by hand, and this is a royal pain in the butt when the deliverer and the deliveree are not in the same building (which was often the case for many of our faculty).

Sketchy Futon

Fun Fact: The Stanford psychology department has a very sketchy futon in front of its ground-floor bathrooms.

I assume that it gets used for 'experiments'.

The New Mathematics Building is Like Disneyland

We really need to be adding easter eggs into these monthly time-lapse movies of the construction of the new Mathematical Institute building. Somewhat less interesting (to me, anyway) are the daily time-lapse videos.

Every time I see something like this, I always think of the old time-lapse movies of the construction of Disneyland. I suppose that a new mathematics building is a little bit less sexy than that, but I like it.

As a special bonus, can you find me in any of the monthly videos?

By the way, one thing that would have been really awesome is to turn in such a video along with one's PhD thesis when ending one's graduate-school career.

Epic Fail

EPIC FAIL: When the building is going to be shut down at 5:30 pm and all vehicle access to the building will be shut down along with it, I should be informed of this situation (which was apparently well known to the people who run the building) before 4:40 pm on the same day---especially when I had previously arranged to be picked up at 7pm. SAMSI, this is yet another epic fail on your part. This is what mailing lists are for.

Caltech's North Houses at "risk of being declared historical buildings"

According to this article in The California Tech, Caltech's North House are at "risk of being declared historical buildings." That would then prevent the Institute from tearing them down and starting from scratch.

While I have tons of great memories of Lloyd House and have severe misgivings about tearing down the North Houses and rebuilding them from scratch (this is for nostalgic reasons; my emotions are kind of clouding my rational thinking on this one), I think the idea that they are "historical buildings" is absolutely preposterous. Can anything from that decade be reasonably be declared a historical building? How about that sand castle that I built on on a beach in Malibu when I was 8 or so? Is that also a historical building?

Sheesh.