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:

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.

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...

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!

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.....

Ithaca, NY

I have made it to Ithaca. I've more or less lost my camera (it's in St. Paul, probably in the third drawer in the built-in drawers in the dining room, and I am in New York) so there are no pictures to be had. I have found the place I'm living, my office in the math building, the local butcher shop and co-op, and the local Finns. Not too bad! Now it's time to pack my lunch for my first day of school at Cornell!

Thanks to friends in town I've had lunch and brunch at Cafe Dewitt and thanks to my spouse I know that Simeon Dewitt was a land surveyor and a big guy in Ithaca history, arriving in 1798 and establishing the town. Ithacans seem to be big on secret history references, as there's also a restaurant called Simeon's that I have not yet patronized. I have, however, already bought books at Buffalo Street Books and Autumn Leaves Books. This is probably a symptom of the same disorder that led to shipping 15 pounds of books back from Berkeley. I used to be a library-frequenter, and now I figure I can buy them -- but that is a bit dangerous, I suppose.

The same weather that prompted cancellation of the Sisu Ski Fest hit Ithaca, and so there is no snow at all. It melted. Then it fell (a few inches). Then on Friday it melted. Today it snowed. It didn't stick. I need to buy waterproof boots.

Other than that, I am preparing for classes to the extent that I can, as Cornell is rather slow in giving folks the NetID which is apparently vital for being considered a real person (bus pass, gym pass, library access, access to my own calculus course's website). Hopefully I will get that soon and be promoted from "Staff" to "Kaisa Taipale". Wish me luck.

Heading to Ithaca

Moving to Ithaca tomorrow (more or less). Time in the Twin Cities has flown past. Back to the monastic mathematical lifestyle!

Besides wrestling with Sage code and thinking a bit about polytopes and reconnecting with family and old friends, I spent some time learning about R, the statistics software I mentioned in an earlier course. I decided to take the quick introduction to R offered by Coursera, one of the major new forces in the MOOC movement. It is a nice way to structure my learning as well as learn about a potentially major competitor in the higher education landscape in coming years. Among other things, it's interesting to see how other professors teach: this is not something I experience much these days!

If/when I learn very cool new things from R, I will put some of them up here. For now, I have learned a very tiny amount about the growth of guinea pig teeth as related to vitamin C consumption, from a data set included with the standard distribution of R.

A day or two later

Preparing for New Year's Eve here: vacuuming rugs (again) and washing floors. We just did this for Christmas!

As far as my learning-about-computers streak, I learned a little bit more about numpy (just basics) and learned about APIs. In particular, I learned how to download info about all the Harry Potter movie reviews in the New York Times. Not deep, but interesting! There are a lot of projects on the web that use APIs to get data about many things. One favorite is Storyark, which lets you "see" the arc of a story. It's not yet phenomenal, as I looked up "mathematics" and got lots of stories about religious nuts and theater.