Retirement Conference for Colin Please

Unfortunately, I just checked and I am still COVID positive, so regrettably I will be missing the retirement conference and party for my Oxford colleague Colin Please. (Alhough I am far from perfect, I feel well enough to have attended if I weren't still testing positive. I may chat with some people during a break outside and from a safe distance.)

A more general thing to point out, and it relates to the fact that I already interacted with Colin several years before he joined the Oxford faculty — I wonder if he remembers my antics during the 'mock tutorial' part of his Oxford interview? — is that I have always admired and enjoyed just how tightly know the British applied-mathematics community is. People across some many of the institutions know each other really well and often "randomly" show up at events in nearby cities even when their affiliations are different. I miss that.

Congratulations to Colin on his retirement!

Dame Frances Kirwan Named "Savilian Professor" at University of Oxford!

Here is some really big news: "Dame Frances Kirwan has been elected to the Savilian Professorship at the University of Oxford. Frances will be the 20th holder of the Savilian Chair (founded in 1619), and is the first woman to be elected to any of the historic chairs in mathematics."

This is a very big deal. (See the Wikipedia entry for a discussion of this professorship.)

I know Frances. (We were colleagues in the Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford, of course) She is awesome (both as a mathematician and as a person).

Frances is somebody who is well-known within mathematics but pretty much unheard of outside mathematics.

'E' is for Erdmann

Entry 'E' in the A-to-Z series on women mathematicians in the Life Through a Mathematician's Eyes tumblr is my Somerville College colleague Karin Erdmann.

It should say "specializes" (present tense), by the way, as Karin is still research-active, even though she's retired. In fact, no doubt, she is now more active in her research, as that is how it often works.

As I write this, the tumblr has gotten up to 'M' so far, and there are many great mathematicians profiled (including, thankfully, people besides the same ones that often show up over and over again in such lists).

(Tip of the cap to Association for Women in Mathematics.)

Proof that England has Sun

Oxford Mathematics Alphabet: "'H' is for Homology"

The latest entry in the Oxford Mathematics Alphabet, 'H' is for Homology, is out today.

It was written by doctoral students Bernadette Stolz (my collaborator and my former masters student, who I cosupervised with Heather Harrington, who is Bernadette's main doctoral supervisor) and Barbara Mahler (my doctoral student, who I am supervising along with Heather Harrington and Ulrike Tilmann).

Andrew Wiles Wins 2016 Abel Prize

The home team won big today: my Mathematical Institute colleague Andrew Wiles has won the 2016 Abel Prize!

Post-Seminar Comments

After our applied math seminars, we have coffee and cookies (and other pastries, or "cakes" as they are known in the UK) in the common room.

Earlier this year, after a particularly frustrating seminar, one of my colleagues uttered the memorable line "I'm going to have a fucking cookie. I earned it." (We all earned it. It was awful.)

But the best (and most memorable) post-seminar piece of snark that I have ever heard occurred during my postdoc years at Caltech and came from the mouth of Catalin Turc: "His theory is retarded."

New UK Knighthoods

The new UK knighthoods have been announced in the New Year's Honours lists.

One of the recipients is my zoologist coauthor (and Somerville colleague) Marian Dawkins, who was honored for "services to Animal Welfare". Clearly, it must have been our joint work on cow synchronization that put her over the top. :) Yeah right. (My other two papers with Marian are another one on cow synchrony and a recent one on dominance relationships in animals.)

Another of the recipients is my Mathematical Institute colleague Frances Kirwan, who was named a DBE for "services to Mathematics".

Major congratulations!

The 20 "Most Influential" Scientists

Well, I'm not sure I actually agree with this list of the 20 most influential living scientists, but I will point out that 2 of them are in the same department as I am (University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute), and---if I not mistaken---not even a single person on this list is at Cambridge (aka, The Other Place). Booyah!

(Tip of the cap to whoever does Facebook posts for the American Mathematical Society.)

Update: In addition to what Justin has pointed out in the comments, Milana Gitaric reminds me that Stephen Hawking is at Cambridge. Well, he is easy to overlook. :)

Teaching in the Ivory Tower

Perhaps I should really call it the "Stone Tower", but in any event I need to rant: I know things are really hectic right now with term about to start and I myself am running around like a headless chicken these days, and I know this can get extremely frustrating at times, but some of my Oxford colleagues seem to actively dislike having students around and also to actively dislike teaching. Well, I have this answer for them (and they do seem to dislike it whenever I respond this way to their seeming disdain for students and for teaching): Go somewhere else --- perhaps outside of the ivory tower --- and get a job that doesn't involve teaching! It's funny how they didn't bring up their dislike of students up during their interview! Sheesh.

Teaching is always time-consuming and often very frustrating --- and there are times when I will complain (rather loudly) about certain aspects of it --- but that doesn't mean that I don't value it. One of the blessings of being at Oxford is the awesome quality of most of the students here. I bring up what our undergrads and my research students can do, and frankly my colleagues at other universities are jealous of what we have. And they should be. This doesn't mean, nor should it have to mean, that there can't be lots of frustrations. (There is little more frustrating to a teacher than the brilliant student who is wasting loads of talent through laziness, real-life stupidity, or some combination of the two.) Another really great aspect about students here --- and this one, I think, is much less apparent until one actually gets here --- is the student-teacher relationship. Namely, at Oxford, the relationship between students and faculty is not an antagonistic one, and that contrasts very starkly with what one sees at many (and perhaps most) US universities. What we have here with the students is so much better than what academics have at just about any other place.

So, while it is true that there are times that teaching will take up loads of time from my research---and it's ok to be frustrated by that (I know that I am sometimes, and I'm more than willing to express it)---I have only one piece of advice for those colleagues who seem to have open disdain for students and for teaching: Leave.

New to the Blogroll: "Principal's Blog", "Somerville Historian", and "Complex Matters"

I have added links to new blogs maintained by three of my Somerville colleagues: our new Principal, one of our history Fellows, and one of our physics Fellows.

Isn't it just like me to show my support?

Connected: A new book about social networks

Given the media play it's received, I should mention my collaborator James Fowler's new popular book about social networks. The book, which James coauthored with Nicholas Christakis, is called Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. The book should be an interesting read (I previously glanced through small parts of it in draft form), but I really think they should lose the term "network man". It's too corny.

(Tip of the cap to James for passing along this particular article.)

Obesity as an epidemic on social networks

A while ago --- maybe something like 1.5 years ago --- I read and provided comments on a preprint by one of my (now-)coauthors James Fowler concerning obesity as an epidemic that spreads on social networks.

Well, the published version of the paper came out last week, and it's been getting a ridiculous amount of press. (Just go to news.google.com and type in "James Fowler" and you'll see.) Articles have appeared in numerous countries as well as in prominent venues like USA Today and the New York Times (in a front-page article that was the second-most e-mailed article in the whole paper at some point!).

Earlier today, James mentioned that he just got off the phone with people from The Daily Show, as they apparently might be interviewing him.

When I was in the waiting room for my visa, I heard people on CNN Headline News discussing epidemic spread of obesity via social networks and was wondering if they were discussion Fowler's article. I hadn't know at the time that the article was just published, so I guess they were talking about them. The people discussing this couldn't get over the fact that things like obesity might spread via social pressures (either explicit or implicit). Of course, that insight itself brought the response of 'duh' from me, because there are entire fields founded on that very principle!

Ratemyprofessor.com

A couple of years ago, two of my research students told me about RateMyProfessors.com, which is a great resource to see which of my colleagues were totally slammed by anonymous students, given chili peppers as a joke (which happens pretty frequently, and it's pretty funny to see how gets them), and so on.

Here are the ratings for Georgia Tech's math department. (Thankfully, nobody put me up there.)

Here is Georgia Tech's physics department.

Here is Caltech.