And I'm back in MN!
I'm almost done unpacking. I got here before the fritillaria stopped blooming, which I'm very happy about. Missed the squill and the rock tulips (but on the other hand got to eat wild ramps in Ithaca).
Lots of gardening. Sleep. Slowly starting to call and email folks.
It is nice to be back :)
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
Spring
Haven't posted for a while. Spring is speeding along, and exams and quizzes are piling up here in Ithaca. Last week was the last midterm and this week is the last week of class. Research is speeding along too -- fun things are happening. I spoke at the AMS sectional in Boulder, Colorado about some new results with collaborators. Now we have to finish the paper!
I enjoy the crocuses, daffodils, hyacinths, etc that are springing up all over Ithaca. Spring has come here much earlier than in Minnesota this year. (Good luck, folks! Hope it's a long enough season to get tomatoes...)
I have been working on some side projects in my spare time -- check out my guest post on mathbabe.org. Most of the work in this kind of project lies in getting the data into the right format. After that, the images are just a few lines of code (and then three more hours to get the legends right). Extra credit for anyone who spots the typo.
I'll be heading back to Minnesota about 2/3 into May. See you soon.
I enjoy the crocuses, daffodils, hyacinths, etc that are springing up all over Ithaca. Spring has come here much earlier than in Minnesota this year. (Good luck, folks! Hope it's a long enough season to get tomatoes...)
I have been working on some side projects in my spare time -- check out my guest post on mathbabe.org. Most of the work in this kind of project lies in getting the data into the right format. After that, the images are just a few lines of code (and then three more hours to get the legends right). Extra credit for anyone who spots the typo.
I'll be heading back to Minnesota about 2/3 into May. See you soon.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Lean In
Sheryl Sandberg's new book "Lean In" is getting all sorts of press and jokes. A couple bloggers I really respect actually read it and recommended it, so I went to the Cornell Bookstore last Tuesday and asked about it. The man staffing the information desk said, "It's not even on the floor yet: we got three copies this morning and you're the second person to ask for one today. I'll go get you one." I took it.
It took me four days to read, since I've got other work to be doing, and I really enjoyed it. It's funny! It's right about a lot of things. The book doesn't aspire to be an academic publication, a real advice book, or even a book with answers; it seems to want to speak the truth about what's really happening (unconscious bias exists in all of us, despite changing social mores) and what we can do to reach a more truly equal society. It made me think about my own choices. Especially lately, many of my career decisions are influenced by family and work-life balance questions: I have spent this year working across the US, away from my Minnesota family, in an effort to find out what I can do and where I should go from here. I've decided I want to be in Minnesota next year, which dramatically curtails my academic employment options. This is not a recipe for academic superstardom or even success. Instead I should be willing to move to whatever continent best serves my career (including Japan or the UK, both of which have great postdocs in my field). We all have to make difficult decisions, though, about what we truly want and what we are willing to sacrifice for. Sandberg doesn't downplay this and her book is not about just hiring a nanny and a housekeeper and heading off to a 70-hour-a-week job without regard to one's truest desires.
The book is unabashedly about encouraging women with high career goals to really reach for them -- to lean in. The main message is, "Go for it -- you'll figure it out (often with the help of a supportive spouse)." "Lean In" aims to expand peoples' ideas of what options are available, reminding us that if you ask (for a parking space for pregnant ladies, for teleconferencing now and then, for a promotion or a lateral move) you will (often) receive. Worth remembering.
A lot of the news coverage has been simplistic and sensational. Anyone who says, "It's easy for Sandberg to say...", "What about stay-at home moms? They deserve respect too!", "She's just telling me to hire a babysitter and abandon my children!", or "Why should I have to be like a man?" is demonstrating ignorance of the content. You can't have a good discussion with these folks. It's like people who think the XYZ affair was about a zipper.
The Mash-up
What I'd really like to see, though, is a conversation contrasting "Lean In" with "Radical Homemakers", the other most interesting book of my spring. "Radical Homemakers" is about combining feminism and radicalism to fight this situation that much of the middle class in the US find themselves in -- to make time for all the work you need to do, you need to outsource food/cleanliness/clothing/health/child care to others, and to afford the take-out or delivered meals/dry cleaning/gym fees/child care, you need to work at a high-paying job. It reminds me of a book I remember reading in college or early grad school, The Two-Income Trap*, with an ecological and DIY twist. The original reason we didn't have this problem is that the home was the locus of production, as "Radical Homemakers" points out: men and women did some different work, but all were involved in food/clothing/health/child & elder care. Then men and women moved out of the home to differing degrees as our economies changed and production moved outside the home. Now we're at the most extreme point in human history, the point at which kids don't know carrots come from the ground and bread is baked from wheat and clothing can be made outside a factory. (Kids these days!) If men and women in the US throw themselves fully into production outside the home, who is going to do the child care, the elder care, the health care, the food production? Is it really healthy, psychologically, for humans to specialize to such a degree? Shouldn't we all do a little cooking and a little cleaning so that we know what it's like? What's the ecological cost of our specialization? On the other hand, "Radical Homemakers" and "Lean In" both point out that neither men alone nor women alone are going to solve our problems: we are going to have to cooperate.
"Radical Homemakers" is the dropping-out counterpoint to "Lean In." I think they're both right. How can that be? Discuss!
* Reading about this book now is interesting: 1) I read something by Elizabeth Warren before she was famous-famous! 2) Take a look at this 2004 article about housing prices and bankruptcy with your 2007-2009 crash glasses on....
It took me four days to read, since I've got other work to be doing, and I really enjoyed it. It's funny! It's right about a lot of things. The book doesn't aspire to be an academic publication, a real advice book, or even a book with answers; it seems to want to speak the truth about what's really happening (unconscious bias exists in all of us, despite changing social mores) and what we can do to reach a more truly equal society. It made me think about my own choices. Especially lately, many of my career decisions are influenced by family and work-life balance questions: I have spent this year working across the US, away from my Minnesota family, in an effort to find out what I can do and where I should go from here. I've decided I want to be in Minnesota next year, which dramatically curtails my academic employment options. This is not a recipe for academic superstardom or even success. Instead I should be willing to move to whatever continent best serves my career (including Japan or the UK, both of which have great postdocs in my field). We all have to make difficult decisions, though, about what we truly want and what we are willing to sacrifice for. Sandberg doesn't downplay this and her book is not about just hiring a nanny and a housekeeper and heading off to a 70-hour-a-week job without regard to one's truest desires.
The book is unabashedly about encouraging women with high career goals to really reach for them -- to lean in. The main message is, "Go for it -- you'll figure it out (often with the help of a supportive spouse)." "Lean In" aims to expand peoples' ideas of what options are available, reminding us that if you ask (for a parking space for pregnant ladies, for teleconferencing now and then, for a promotion or a lateral move) you will (often) receive. Worth remembering.
A lot of the news coverage has been simplistic and sensational. Anyone who says, "It's easy for Sandberg to say...", "What about stay-at home moms? They deserve respect too!", "She's just telling me to hire a babysitter and abandon my children!", or "Why should I have to be like a man?" is demonstrating ignorance of the content. You can't have a good discussion with these folks. It's like people who think the XYZ affair was about a zipper.
The Mash-up
What I'd really like to see, though, is a conversation contrasting "Lean In" with "Radical Homemakers", the other most interesting book of my spring. "Radical Homemakers" is about combining feminism and radicalism to fight this situation that much of the middle class in the US find themselves in -- to make time for all the work you need to do, you need to outsource food/cleanliness/clothing/health/child care to others, and to afford the take-out or delivered meals/dry cleaning/gym fees/child care, you need to work at a high-paying job. It reminds me of a book I remember reading in college or early grad school, The Two-Income Trap*, with an ecological and DIY twist. The original reason we didn't have this problem is that the home was the locus of production, as "Radical Homemakers" points out: men and women did some different work, but all were involved in food/clothing/health/child & elder care. Then men and women moved out of the home to differing degrees as our economies changed and production moved outside the home. Now we're at the most extreme point in human history, the point at which kids don't know carrots come from the ground and bread is baked from wheat and clothing can be made outside a factory. (Kids these days!) If men and women in the US throw themselves fully into production outside the home, who is going to do the child care, the elder care, the health care, the food production? Is it really healthy, psychologically, for humans to specialize to such a degree? Shouldn't we all do a little cooking and a little cleaning so that we know what it's like? What's the ecological cost of our specialization? On the other hand, "Radical Homemakers" and "Lean In" both point out that neither men alone nor women alone are going to solve our problems: we are going to have to cooperate.
"Radical Homemakers" is the dropping-out counterpoint to "Lean In." I think they're both right. How can that be? Discuss!
* Reading about this book now is interesting: 1) I read something by Elizabeth Warren before she was famous-famous! 2) Take a look at this 2004 article about housing prices and bankruptcy with your 2007-2009 crash glasses on....
Friday, March 29, 2013
The travelling life
I haven't posted for a month, mostly because I've been on the road a lot. Where? First Minnesota for some birthdays and family time. Then Providence, Rhode Island, for the Schubert Calculus, Whittaker Functions, and Crystals conference. That was pretty interesting: I learned about some nice work of Ed Richmond, Alex Yong, and Dave Anderson that might fit in with work I'm doing with my collaborators, and I think I proved something there. (Typing it up right now, which is always the first real test.) After RI, back to Ithaca for a week, and then it was Spring Break.
For the first time in my life I went south over spring break. With the spouse, I visited Washington, DC for about 16 hours including a good night's sleep, then Charleston, South Carolina; Beaufort, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia. Charleston is a beautiful and striking city. We visited Fort Sumter and took some walking tours. For a self-guided tour, I'd recommend A Gullah Guide to Charleston. It was easy to carry along in a pocket and pull out for some history and personal stories all around Charleston, and it was a nice balance to all the official plaques about famous politicians. I learned something about John C. Calhoun in particular. Remember the fuss about Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis a few years ago? I didn't understand much about it then, but learning more about him in his home state, I understand a lot more! He really is quite a historical figure: a staunch proponent of slavery (not as a "necessary evil" but as a "positive good"), nullification, and secession. The guy didn't even want the US to survive as a nation, one could argue, so why does he get a lake in Minneapolis?
Charleston has a pretty and walkable downtown, but walking the short distance to our hotel across the river wasn't so pleasant, and taking the bus from the Amtrak station and to the airport was not that convenient. It's a town that clearly makes sure some visitors are very well served but does not put a lot of effort into public transit or walkable infrastructure. There is also broken glass everywhere, outside the poorest and poshest establishments -- is it how they do recycling, or was it an after-effect of St. Patrick's day? There is some delicious food in Charleston, though, and we enjoyed our chicken and waffles, collard greens, grits, fried pork chop, and even a fried quail.
Beaufort, SC, is a small and idyllic town of grand houses and Spanish moss. We used it mostly as a base to visit Hunting Island State Park. We spent one evening looking at the sun set over the marsh, seeing little crabs, a great blue heron, and jumping fish make their way through winding streams, and one day on the shore of the ocean. I learned a lot about little mollusks and how they like to burrow into the water. The scenes also powerfully illustrated the force of nature against human construction:
For the first time in my life I went south over spring break. With the spouse, I visited Washington, DC for about 16 hours including a good night's sleep, then Charleston, South Carolina; Beaufort, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia. Charleston is a beautiful and striking city. We visited Fort Sumter and took some walking tours. For a self-guided tour, I'd recommend A Gullah Guide to Charleston. It was easy to carry along in a pocket and pull out for some history and personal stories all around Charleston, and it was a nice balance to all the official plaques about famous politicians. I learned something about John C. Calhoun in particular. Remember the fuss about Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis a few years ago? I didn't understand much about it then, but learning more about him in his home state, I understand a lot more! He really is quite a historical figure: a staunch proponent of slavery (not as a "necessary evil" but as a "positive good"), nullification, and secession. The guy didn't even want the US to survive as a nation, one could argue, so why does he get a lake in Minneapolis?
Charleston has a pretty and walkable downtown, but walking the short distance to our hotel across the river wasn't so pleasant, and taking the bus from the Amtrak station and to the airport was not that convenient. It's a town that clearly makes sure some visitors are very well served but does not put a lot of effort into public transit or walkable infrastructure. There is also broken glass everywhere, outside the poorest and poshest establishments -- is it how they do recycling, or was it an after-effect of St. Patrick's day? There is some delicious food in Charleston, though, and we enjoyed our chicken and waffles, collard greens, grits, fried pork chop, and even a fried quail.
Beaufort, SC, is a small and idyllic town of grand houses and Spanish moss. We used it mostly as a base to visit Hunting Island State Park. We spent one evening looking at the sun set over the marsh, seeing little crabs, a great blue heron, and jumping fish make their way through winding streams, and one day on the shore of the ocean. I learned a lot about little mollusks and how they like to burrow into the water. The scenes also powerfully illustrated the force of nature against human construction:
That's asphalt!
I got a tiny sunburn despite my phenomenal new hat, but it went away pretty quickly.
Last was Savannah, GA, which stole our hearts. The riverfront is touristy, but the parks every few blocks are amazing. The cemeteries are pretty. The flowers are amazing. The mood is mellow. The customer service guy at the Kroger was very, very nice. There is no broken glass even though the population of Savannah triples over St. Patrick's Day, and while it looks like 101 Dalmatians right after work because everybody is walking a dog or two, there is no dog poop on the streets! It seems like Savannahns (?) like their city and take care of it. The public transit system is quite nice, from our short experience. (In Charleston the bus driver pulled away from a stop even though she saw a man coming for the bus; in Savannah the driver pulled off the highway to wait for two men she saw on the other side of the road.) We learned about some history there, too; the original Georgia colony was founded as a grand utopian experiment that outlawed three evils -- slavery, lawyers, and rum. That didn't last, but maybe some of the feeling has. Great restaurants there, too, and a better beer selection than anywhere else on our trip except DC.
I got back to Minnesota for the weekend and enjoyed that a lot, as well. Miss all the family on this Easter weekend.... I'll be grading exams and writing some talks on Totally Awesome Mathematics, but I'll try not to work the whole time.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
New news
Since February 11th, when I last posted, I have:
- been miserably sick for a week and a half with a sinus and upper-respiratory infection that caused me to lose my voice completely for two days (viral laryngitis -- it was like a miracle -- went away and then came back!)
- traveled to Philadelphia with the spouse, partly during my lost-voice days
- encouraged the spouse to engage in all the most button-pushing, inflammatory discussions possible while my voice was gone, so I would not be able to argue back (but he didn't have the heart! even though it might have been amusing!)
- had the best pretzel in my entire life at Reading Terminal Market and the best American Italian dinner of my life at Villa di Roma
- visited the ruins of George Washington's house on Presidents' Day (and lots of other historic sites too)
- thought about liberty and the American dream, and who is realizing that dream and who is not, and why
- written and graded the first midterm exam of Math 1110 here at the university
- slept a lot, then stayed up to grade, then relapsed into sickness, then slept some more
- and thought and written about polygon space, the space of n-sided polygons in 3-dimensional space up to rotation. This is a rather weird space to me so I've had to think a lot to understand even the basics.
A few other things have happened (for instance, I read Victor Kreiman's paper about using skew barred tableaux for Littlewood-Richardson computations, and then did some calculations that way!) but the highlights and lowlights really are the food of Philadelphia, illness, liberty, and the midterm.
How's that for a crazy two weeks? Now it's time to catch up on my email...
Monday, February 11, 2013
More history facts
I subbed for a colleague's multivariable calculus class today, and looked up Taylor series on (gasp!) Wikipedia. Why would I do something so crass? Well, Wikipedia is actually pretty good for math -- I can evaluate what is true and what is false on a mathematical level, and the Wikipedia article has some history and links to other topics that I would not necessarily come up with on my own. In particular, some of the Wikipedia articles on math have some historical background included. The Taylor series article of course mentions Zeno, who comes up in my single-variable calculus class as well for his work on limits, and Taylor and Maclaurin, for whom Taylor and Maclaurin series are fairly or unfairly named. But I didn't know about Liu Hui's work on approximating pi (or work in applications of geometry), or Madhava of Sangamagrama's pioneering work on the infinite series for trigonometric functions. It sounds like Madhava in particular understood limits (and error terms and convergence of series) far before mathematicians in Europe, for instance. There's a rumor that Jesuit priests visiting India brought some of his ideas back to Europe.
In my historical explorations, I also found out that Cornell (my current institution) can boast of graduating the first black PhD mathematician in the world! Elbert Cox earned his PhD here in 1925, a year in which there were only 28 PhDs in mathematics given in the entire country. American mathematics was still very young. His advisor was William Lloyd Garrison Williams, a Quaker named after the abolitionist. Cox's thesis was on solutions to polynomial difference equations. Difference equations are a discrete analogue of differential equations, at least if the language then is the same as now. Difference equations are really cool, giving us maps like the logistic map. Chaos shows up pretty soon in this story...
A little bit more history: apparently the year that Elbert Cox was awarded the Scholarship of Mathematics at Cornell (the graduate fellowship of the time), the other awardee was Julia Dale, who had attended college in Missouri. Julia Dale also ended up in academia, in the end at Duke University. There she apparently headed the "women's division of mathematics" (!!). This contrasts with the career of Ida Metcalf, the second women in the US to get a PhD in mathematics (not necessarily coincidentally, also from Cornell) and the first American woman with a PhD in math to get recruited into finance, as a security analyst!
In my historical explorations, I also found out that Cornell (my current institution) can boast of graduating the first black PhD mathematician in the world! Elbert Cox earned his PhD here in 1925, a year in which there were only 28 PhDs in mathematics given in the entire country. American mathematics was still very young. His advisor was William Lloyd Garrison Williams, a Quaker named after the abolitionist. Cox's thesis was on solutions to polynomial difference equations. Difference equations are a discrete analogue of differential equations, at least if the language then is the same as now. Difference equations are really cool, giving us maps like the logistic map. Chaos shows up pretty soon in this story...
A little bit more history: apparently the year that Elbert Cox was awarded the Scholarship of Mathematics at Cornell (the graduate fellowship of the time), the other awardee was Julia Dale, who had attended college in Missouri. Julia Dale also ended up in academia, in the end at Duke University. There she apparently headed the "women's division of mathematics" (!!). This contrasts with the career of Ida Metcalf, the second women in the US to get a PhD in mathematics (not necessarily coincidentally, also from Cornell) and the first American woman with a PhD in math to get recruited into finance, as a security analyst!
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
I am a real person, approved by the bureaucracy
I do have my NetID now, which makes me a real person!
I also bought really waterproof boots. This is good, as it has snowed and melted several more times here. No skiing.
Getting back into the teaching/research groove -- getting to know a new group of students. Different universities and colleges have distinctly different cultures around attendance, classroom behavior, office hours, enrollment changes, and all sorts of things. It's interesting to see what's true here. At St. Olaf I taught a very liberal-arts style math class, mentioning many applications to biology or economics and bringing up interconnections with art and history in small projects. At the U of MN I taught a very straightforwardly engineering-calc type of class a few times, and then worked with UMTYMP with students who are delighted by pondering the intricacies of infinity just for fun. Cornell is different than either -- it's a big school so I can't do the class projects and tweaking of the curriculum I did at St. Olaf, but I'm working with architecture students and hoteliers instead of engineers. I'm certainly still feeling out how to most effectively engage with the classical material of calculus. We're working on limits this week: a great philosophical achievement and abstract idea. What do limits mean to us today, though? Why do we study them, other than the fact that they're in the definition of the derivative?
Continuing my experiments with R in my contracting free time -- I learned a lot about murder in Baltimore and some about hospital quality as related to size and ownership from my Coursera course, which just wrapped up. I really enjoyed the experience! The concrete nature of statistics is a fun contrast to the abstraction of, say, torus actions on moduli spaces of stable maps.....
I also bought really waterproof boots. This is good, as it has snowed and melted several more times here. No skiing.
Getting back into the teaching/research groove -- getting to know a new group of students. Different universities and colleges have distinctly different cultures around attendance, classroom behavior, office hours, enrollment changes, and all sorts of things. It's interesting to see what's true here. At St. Olaf I taught a very liberal-arts style math class, mentioning many applications to biology or economics and bringing up interconnections with art and history in small projects. At the U of MN I taught a very straightforwardly engineering-calc type of class a few times, and then worked with UMTYMP with students who are delighted by pondering the intricacies of infinity just for fun. Cornell is different than either -- it's a big school so I can't do the class projects and tweaking of the curriculum I did at St. Olaf, but I'm working with architecture students and hoteliers instead of engineers. I'm certainly still feeling out how to most effectively engage with the classical material of calculus. We're working on limits this week: a great philosophical achievement and abstract idea. What do limits mean to us today, though? Why do we study them, other than the fact that they're in the definition of the derivative?
Continuing my experiments with R in my contracting free time -- I learned a lot about murder in Baltimore and some about hospital quality as related to size and ownership from my Coursera course, which just wrapped up. I really enjoyed the experience! The concrete nature of statistics is a fun contrast to the abstraction of, say, torus actions on moduli spaces of stable maps.....
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