Thoughts From Mathfest: Day 3
Slept a little over 6 hours which is good for me. I had to wake up early because I wanted to check out and a friend was giving a talk in the second part of the recreational math session. They had free bagels and coffee in the exhibit hall, so I grabbed my breakfast and went up to the session. The editor of the Journal of Recreational Mathematics was there, so I got to ask him if he thought my talk from the day before was the sort of thing I should attempt to submit to his journal. He seemed to give a pretty positive response, so I have a place I could send my paper to (if I can get myself to actively finish it.)
My friend was talking about a reversal of the home prime conjecture. I talked him into submitting some sequences to the OEIS and he seemed very happy with me for it. It's kind of funny that he hasn't yet, as a colleague of his is sort of data mining the OEIS in an attempt to find connections between sequences already in the encyclopedia. Not every department talks to each other about what they are doing. Mine certainly doesn't.
In the next talk a guy named a sequence after himself and gave a presentation on its growth. I refuse to name anything after myself, as it can be seen as egotistical, but he didn't seem to take himself too seriously, and his talk was fun and the math legit. Then a presenter was sick, but he asked the hosts of the session to give his talk for him, something I've never seen happen before. Apparently it was unusual enough that they had to ask if it was allowed from the higher-ups in the MAA.
Then my friend from the hottub gave a talk on Press Your Luck (no whammies) which is something audiences can't resist. I think his was the best attended talk of the session. After talks on basketball metrics and error correcting code magic tricks, I left before the last talk to participate in the book deal of the day. The MAA was selling books for $6 but not telling people what they were until 11:30am each day where the announced the next deal. It was a nice enough History of Math hardcover, so I got it for reading on the plane.
I mingled a bit in the exhibits during lunch hour and ate too many bagels (I am officially off my diet for this trip.) I was torn as I had a flight at 2:55 but I wanted to attend a 1-2:20pm panel. I stayed till 1:20 and hopped on my shuttle to the airport.
The reason it was hard was that it was the editors of the various MAA journals talking about how to write for their journals. One of the editors asked me if I had an idea for a submission, and I had the perfect opportunity to tell him about my upcoming paper, and of course I didn't. If I could have stayed just a tiny bit longer, the panel would have broken up into groups and I could have shared my idea with him. I could have at least found out if he thought my paper might be the kind of thing that would be accepted. But instead I had to get to the airport so I could fly west to Minnesota and then wait for three and a half hours before hopping on a flight home.