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.....