Back in the Day: Spring 2001 Penn State/Maryland Dynamical Systems Conference

The recent announcement of the Fields Medals brought me to thinking back at the 2001 Spring Maryland-Penn State dynamical systems conference.

In addition to the schedule --- which included somebody who already had won the Fields medal, who I successfully challenged with one of my questions even though I was just a grad student; somebody else who would win one later; and several other speakers who I met for the first time at that conference and would see many times since over the years --- there were also other people (like Howie Weiss) in the audience with whom I would subsequently interact a lot over the years. This also includes several people from University of Maryland (such as Brian Hunt, who was one of the conference's main organizers), though I am pretty sure that Jim Yorke wasn't around for that conference. (I would meet him many times later.) One of my friends from Caltech also attended the conference, and several audience members who weren't speakers also have moved on to bigger and better mathematical things.

I also vaguely remember that audience-member Misha Brin (who was not yet known as "Sergey's father" at the time) was not particularly fond of the research that I presented in my talk, though I'm not really sure whether that was just his mannerisms or his actual opinion.

Several of the attendees who were still doing rather pure work then are now rather applied in most of their work. (Or have even become famous entrepreneurs in the tech world. :) ) Given what people have done since that conference, it's a rather impressive selection of speakers among the people who hadn't yet "made it" at the time.

What Happens in Barcelona Stays in Barcelona

Well, I finally made it to Barcelona. I have been meaning to go for several years, and I even was planning to go to a conference here a few years ago (but I was only given a poster presentation and --- under the circumstances of the initial e-mail response to my abstract when I submitted it --- it felt like a bait-and-switch, so I declined it). Now I am here for the 2013 European Conference on Complex Systems and for its associated satellite meetings. I have never gone to this conference series before, though some of my collaborators have previously presented our joint work at ECCS conferences. I already ran into Alex Vespignani at the hotel check-in desk, so I know I'm in the right place!

I was tempted to introduce this post with a Crystallian (as in Billy) fake European accent as a nod to a certain oral report I did in 7th grade on the city of Barcelona. The school year was 1988-89, and we chose Barcelona as our city on which to report because of the 1992 Summer Olympic Games for a presentation in Andrea Ambler's class. I think it was my idea --- not too creative, I admit. In our oral presentation (and in other presentations on other European cities), every single person used the same fake European accent --- no matter which European city was covered in their report. It was kind of ridiculous. (Is it too late to apologize for this past transgression? Now that I have several European friends, I feel like I owe them a retrospective apology for that oral report.) And for those of you who don't know what that "European" accent sounds like, let's just say that it's simply marvelous. In summary: My group's 7th-grade report on a European city was on Barcelona, our collective notion of a European accent (for all countries) was Billy Crystal, and this series of oral reports must have been extremely painful to watch (and, especially, to listen to) for anybody in the room who had any knowledge at all about Europe. Those were the days.

Update (7/01/14): I think I forgot to post my pictures from Barcelona.

Some Snippets of Snarkiness from my Doctoral Dissertation

I was telling some people on Saturday about one of the many snarky things I did in my doctoral dissertation. I was just looking at my copy of my dissertation and reminiscing about the many snarky things I did with that document.

For example, the version I kept and the version I left in the Center for Applied Mathematics has the title "Quantum Chaos in Vibrating Billiard Systems: Version 2". (The 'Version 2' part isn't in the title in the official copies, but I placed it there after I was asked for Version 2.0 instead of 1.1 after I showed 1.0 to my thesis committee. I had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch in about 5 weeks---I made it by one day---and I was feeling extremely bitter.)

My Biographical Sketch in the thesis started off with the following quote from Scott Adams: "Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion." Of course, I wrote that thinking that science and perhaps even trying to get a Ph.D. also belonged there. I write this blog entry now with the knowledge that things have paid off for me quite well scientifically. I had forgotten that I used that quote, and I certainly didn't think I'd be where I am now when I wrote it. I had some other quotes at the top of that section as well, but I'll ignore them. Then I had a bunch of other stuff in the biographical sketch (some series, some not so serious), which I ended with the following words: "Mason has promised to continue his misadventures and remain someone who is distinctive and easily-remembered (even if not always fondly so). Meanwhile, he plans to go outside and frolic." I think I have mostly kept this promise, at least when it comes to the first sentence.

Then came my Dedication: "To my friends, who have always been able to figure out when to boot me in the head. Honorable mention goes to the Los Angeles Dodgers." This too remains rather accurate, though I think my precise phrasing would be slightly different now.

I have a couple of other quotes at the beginning of the Acknowledgements section (one serious and one snarky). I wrote a rather long section because that's the main thing that people looking at my dissertation will actually read. :) I was occasionally quite snarky, but I was sometimes serious as well and I mentioned many of my best friends by name. I separately mentioned friends and other people who helped me with various thesis-related things along the way.

Perhaps my favorite line comes from the one-sentence paragraph with which I ended my Acknowledgements. (This is the one I was conveying on Saturday.) I had looked at several dissertations while I was writing mine up and many of them thanked god. One of them had particularly irked me because it spent 1 sentence thanking wife and kids and then two pages thanking god. I was thus inspired (also with more than a little inspiration from the fact that Michael Berry would often write at the end of his papers that no money from military organizations contributed to the research) to end my Acknowledgements as follows: This dissertation was completed without assistance or inspiration from any deities, as no such beings exist.

Then of course we got to less interesting stuff like my table of contents, list of figures, and scientific chapters.

In the copy I left for Cornell's Center for Applied Mathematics, I left an additional easter egg that I wrote in handwriting. It basically said that I didn't mind how the thesis was used as long as it wasn't used for toilet paper. Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact phrasing.