CT 2007 HLCGB
High: hanging out on the beach after the conference dinner with Tom, Steve Lack, Eugenia Cheng, Peter Lumsdaine, Emily and Louise, and Telyn Kusalik. Great fun, good company, an amazing starfield, and cold but invigorating water to swim in :-) Also, in general, the surroundings: Carvoeiro's a beautiful place.
Out of the talks, there are some good candidates. Jonathan Cohen's talk on coherence and rewriting systems stands out, as do the talks by Nick Gurski, Jiri Adamek, Michael Johnson, Peter Johnstone and Bob Coecke. Tom and Eugenia's talks were of course excellent, but I've come to expect that by now :-)
Overall, the level of talks was pretty good, and I took about forty pages of notes. I think I went to around forty talks, understood the majority of about ten, and got bits out of another ten or so (and have heavy "LOOK THIS UP"s written down for another couple). This is, for me, a pretty good ratio.
Low: Hard to say, because the whole week was pretty good. Possibly being unable to stay awake in Bill Lawvere's talk: it was the first talk of the conference, and I was still pretty tired from travelling. Also, forgetting that I still needed to pay the conference registration fee, and being considerably poorer than expected for the rest of the week :-(
Crush: I always have trouble with this one. For those of you who aren't jugglers and aren't familiar with the HLCGB format, it's meant to be the person you most admire, not the person you most fancy. I dunno - far too much impressive stuff going on. Pass.
Goal: Not screw up talk: check, I think. It certainly went a lot better than Nice, and several people told me afterwards that they liked it. Peoplelaughed at the jokes, and I got to use the phrase "strictly symmetric monoidal categories are no use to man or beast".
Track down references to theorems I need: half-check. I've got some leads to chase up. Steve Lack was very helpful, as ever.
Have good time with old friends and make new ones: solid check. As is becoming traditional, I spent a lot of time hanging around with the Canadian grad students and their hangers-on, who this year included a few Americans and a couple of Brits - there were a good few people along who'd just finished Cambridge Part III, and to everyone's delight, they all got distinctions. Micah and Anna McCurdy were on their usual good form, and hosted most of the dinners (we were all feeling the pinch a bit, and dinner at people's apartments was felt to be the sensible option as well as the friendly one). And I got to see a fair bit of Jeff Egger as well, starting from the departure lounge in Gatwick - somehow we'd ended up on the same flight, even though I was coming from Glasgow and he was coming from Austria! One of these days I should spend time at a conference with the grown-ups...
Bane: having my talk on the last day, so far too many of my spare minutes were spent twiddling the slides and rehearsing rather than hanging but down at the beach. Staying at an apartment 20 minutes' walk away from the hotel, so I was always late for the first lecture in the morning. But every cloud has a silver lining: the extra time meant my talk was a lot better, and I was able to get some very useful feedback from Geoff Cruttwell and Tom. Living away from the main hotel made my accommodation bill significantly cheaper, and meant I could host the party on the last night :-)
Some other thoughts: the semi-abelian guys' project to generalise the whole of homology theory to the semi-abelian setting seems to be proceeding apace, and now that I've learned a bit about abelian categories I finally feel like I've got some sense of what they're trying to do. Either quantales are growing in importance, or they've been important for ages and I've only just noticed - they were certainly much in evidence. Similarly, lots of talks involved model categories, which now seem to be the default way of attacking categories equipped with some notion of "sameness" - obviously model categories are not just for geometers any more... Sounds like I should make some effort to understand those two things: no doubt for the latter I shall be substantially aided by the handy three-line definition of model category given by Jiri Rosicky :-) Similarly, I think I really need to buckle down and learn some categorical universal algebra (sketch theory and so on) - who knows, it might even be useful...
Out of the talks, there are some good candidates. Jonathan Cohen's talk on coherence and rewriting systems stands out, as do the talks by Nick Gurski, Jiri Adamek, Michael Johnson, Peter Johnstone and Bob Coecke. Tom and Eugenia's talks were of course excellent, but I've come to expect that by now :-)
Overall, the level of talks was pretty good, and I took about forty pages of notes. I think I went to around forty talks, understood the majority of about ten, and got bits out of another ten or so (and have heavy "LOOK THIS UP"s written down for another couple). This is, for me, a pretty good ratio.
Low: Hard to say, because the whole week was pretty good. Possibly being unable to stay awake in Bill Lawvere's talk: it was the first talk of the conference, and I was still pretty tired from travelling. Also, forgetting that I still needed to pay the conference registration fee, and being considerably poorer than expected for the rest of the week :-(
Crush: I always have trouble with this one. For those of you who aren't jugglers and aren't familiar with the HLCGB format, it's meant to be the person you most admire, not the person you most fancy. I dunno - far too much impressive stuff going on. Pass.
Goal: Not screw up talk: check, I think. It certainly went a lot better than Nice, and several people told me afterwards that they liked it. Peoplelaughed at the jokes, and I got to use the phrase "strictly symmetric monoidal categories are no use to man or beast".
Track down references to theorems I need: half-check. I've got some leads to chase up. Steve Lack was very helpful, as ever.
Have good time with old friends and make new ones: solid check. As is becoming traditional, I spent a lot of time hanging around with the Canadian grad students and their hangers-on, who this year included a few Americans and a couple of Brits - there were a good few people along who'd just finished Cambridge Part III, and to everyone's delight, they all got distinctions. Micah and Anna McCurdy were on their usual good form, and hosted most of the dinners (we were all feeling the pinch a bit, and dinner at people's apartments was felt to be the sensible option as well as the friendly one). And I got to see a fair bit of Jeff Egger as well, starting from the departure lounge in Gatwick - somehow we'd ended up on the same flight, even though I was coming from Glasgow and he was coming from Austria! One of these days I should spend time at a conference with the grown-ups...
Bane: having my talk on the last day, so far too many of my spare minutes were spent twiddling the slides and rehearsing rather than hanging but down at the beach. Staying at an apartment 20 minutes' walk away from the hotel, so I was always late for the first lecture in the morning. But every cloud has a silver lining: the extra time meant my talk was a lot better, and I was able to get some very useful feedback from Geoff Cruttwell and Tom. Living away from the main hotel made my accommodation bill significantly cheaper, and meant I could host the party on the last night :-)
Some other thoughts: the semi-abelian guys' project to generalise the whole of homology theory to the semi-abelian setting seems to be proceeding apace, and now that I've learned a bit about abelian categories I finally feel like I've got some sense of what they're trying to do. Either quantales are growing in importance, or they've been important for ages and I've only just noticed - they were certainly much in evidence. Similarly, lots of talks involved model categories, which now seem to be the default way of attacking categories equipped with some notion of "sameness" - obviously model categories are not just for geometers any more... Sounds like I should make some effort to understand those two things: no doubt for the latter I shall be substantially aided by the handy three-line definition of model category given by Jiri Rosicky :-) Similarly, I think I really need to buckle down and learn some categorical universal algebra (sketch theory and so on) - who knows, it might even be useful...