West Coast Number Theory Day 1
(insert italisized metaphorical subtitle)
The first day was pretty much exactly as I'd been warned, with some pretty encouraging highlights. I have no internet now, and no cell phone reception, but everyone's asleep and I'm not ready for that yet, so I'll let this paragraph bleed into the next and talk about
The Trip: I was a little lightheaded from lack of food but otherwise pleasant. I barely made it. Laura (Nathan's ex) gave me a ride in her Pimpin' convertible and I 'found' the airbus just in time.
Dinner: I was a little shy. But it was fun. No alcohol at dinner, but as the picture shows there was a bit afterwards. The single person I knew at dinner was Nils Bruin, who happened to sit next to me, which was nice.
Organization: I chickened out of giving a talk. BOO!!! I reason that I actually want to have somewhat finished what I'm working on before I talk about it.
After the post organization drinking I feel better though. Nils was writing his talk for the morning the corner and being relatively antisocial, so I made friends with some easy-to-make-friends-with people. I was the only grad student, and there was one post-doc that I'm getting a long well with. Most of the people are professors or, suprisingly, people in The Real World. OooOooO.
After chatting with my characteristically-of-mathematicians odd roomate and the post-doc, a couple of the older folks walked in with a few beers and wine. Or rather, a lot of beer and wine. We were a riot, apparently, because someone from our lodge (oh, and I'm staying in a lodge, which is pretty cool), called in a complaint. Its apparently against the rules to drink in a state park...
The Reassuring Thing: After several beers, someone asked the lowly grad student what he was working on. (2,3,11) eventually came up, and suddenly Mr. Silent-In-The-Corner Bruin was beside me and very curious about what I was working on. He gave me a couple of very good reasons why what I am working on will be very interesting to a lot of people. Short verson is that for the (2,3,7) case, Bjorn et all really pulled out all the stops and used a lot of very cutting edge stuff to solve it. The part I knew was that every little part of what they did was a very interesting piece of mathematics. This is why I was initially so enthusiastic about this problem (as opposed to (2,3,10)) - it meant that I would have a lot of motivation to sit down and understand modular forms and modularity, or non-abelian cohomology, or Chaubaty's method, or 1-\zeta descent.
Nils made the observation that their solution was really unique and the first time a problem has been solved with these techniques, and even if all I do is repeat what they did for (2,3,11), people will be very interested just to see it work again (as opposed to (2,3,10), which is another project for me but kind of more of the same. Although this is one of those few cases in number theory where I think i would find the answer more interesting than the problem, because if there are anymore solutions to (a,b,c), they're probably either in (2,3,10) or (2,3,11), so I will take a hack at it sometime).
Anyway, he convinced me that a lot of people would think that this was pretty cool. And you know, I do math because I think its pretty cool, so this makes me pretty happy.
Other: Afterwards, a couple of distinct people individually cornered me and quitely and hopefully asked me if Bjorn was coming (which he isn't). It makes me happy to see how people really like Bjorn.
More Other: I'm somewhat annoyed to be at this conference, for exactly one powerful reason. This morning was the last time I'll see the OMD until I get back from Tucson on January 10th. Ironically, I bought my tickets home and applied for funding for this conference the same day that I put out the Craigslist ad that she replied to. The worst of this is that she had her math 53 final TODAY and so we couldn't really spend much time together the last few days.
I really like her, its going to be hard to suddenly spend that much time apart.
On the flip side, someone here mentioned his wife flying in the last day of the conference and spending a few more days here, and it crossed my mind that that was something fun I have to look forward to doing with the OMD. At least, you know, after we've been dating for more than a month:)
The Trip: I was a little lightheaded from lack of food but otherwise pleasant. I barely made it. Laura (Nathan's ex) gave me a ride in her Pimpin' convertible and I 'found' the airbus just in time.
Dinner: I was a little shy. But it was fun. No alcohol at dinner, but as the picture shows there was a bit afterwards. The single person I knew at dinner was Nils Bruin, who happened to sit next to me, which was nice.
Organization: I chickened out of giving a talk. BOO!!! I reason that I actually want to have somewhat finished what I'm working on before I talk about it.
After the post organization drinking I feel better though. Nils was writing his talk for the morning the corner and being relatively antisocial, so I made friends with some easy-to-make-friends-with people. I was the only grad student, and there was one post-doc that I'm getting a long well with. Most of the people are professors or, suprisingly, people in The Real World. OooOooO.
After chatting with my characteristically-of-mathematicians odd roomate and the post-doc, a couple of the older folks walked in with a few beers and wine. Or rather, a lot of beer and wine. We were a riot, apparently, because someone from our lodge (oh, and I'm staying in a lodge, which is pretty cool), called in a complaint. Its apparently against the rules to drink in a state park...
The Reassuring Thing: After several beers, someone asked the lowly grad student what he was working on. (2,3,11) eventually came up, and suddenly Mr. Silent-In-The-Corner Bruin was beside me and very curious about what I was working on. He gave me a couple of very good reasons why what I am working on will be very interesting to a lot of people. Short verson is that for the (2,3,7) case, Bjorn et all really pulled out all the stops and used a lot of very cutting edge stuff to solve it. The part I knew was that every little part of what they did was a very interesting piece of mathematics. This is why I was initially so enthusiastic about this problem (as opposed to (2,3,10)) - it meant that I would have a lot of motivation to sit down and understand modular forms and modularity, or non-abelian cohomology, or Chaubaty's method, or 1-\zeta descent.
Nils made the observation that their solution was really unique and the first time a problem has been solved with these techniques, and even if all I do is repeat what they did for (2,3,11), people will be very interested just to see it work again (as opposed to (2,3,10), which is another project for me but kind of more of the same. Although this is one of those few cases in number theory where I think i would find the answer more interesting than the problem, because if there are anymore solutions to (a,b,c), they're probably either in (2,3,10) or (2,3,11), so I will take a hack at it sometime).
Anyway, he convinced me that a lot of people would think that this was pretty cool. And you know, I do math because I think its pretty cool, so this makes me pretty happy.
Other: Afterwards, a couple of distinct people individually cornered me and quitely and hopefully asked me if Bjorn was coming (which he isn't). It makes me happy to see how people really like Bjorn.
More Other: I'm somewhat annoyed to be at this conference, for exactly one powerful reason. This morning was the last time I'll see the OMD until I get back from Tucson on January 10th. Ironically, I bought my tickets home and applied for funding for this conference the same day that I put out the Craigslist ad that she replied to. The worst of this is that she had her math 53 final TODAY and so we couldn't really spend much time together the last few days.
I really like her, its going to be hard to suddenly spend that much time apart.
On the flip side, someone here mentioned his wife flying in the last day of the conference and spending a few more days here, and it crossed my mind that that was something fun I have to look forward to doing with the OMD. At least, you know, after we've been dating for more than a month:)