Second Stop: UC Davis

I had opportunity for another pre-travel conference.  The timing couldn't have been better, and the conference couldn't have been better.  This was the Golden Section meeting of the MAA. and it was held at U.C. Davis.  The conference was on Saturday, February 27, and the UCD math department held a math festival the day before, consisting of three seminar talks.

The biggest draw for me was the fact that Persi Diaconis would be speaking at this conference.  He spoke both at the festival and at the conference.  I've known of him and his work for years and was hoping to hear him - and hoping against hope to actually meet him, and I got to! He is a brilliant, world-renowned mathematician, and yet he is so down-to-earth and kind; it was absolutely wonderful talking with him!

I also love his style of presentation - begin and end with CHOCOLATE!  The title of this talk was "Between Combinatorics and Chocolate," but it was more like "Combinatorics between Chocolate and Chocolate!" :-)

This was my first time on the UC Davis campus.  Given how well-known the campus and the whole city is for biking, I found the decor on student housing to be quite clever and appropriate.

Partway through the second day of talks there was time to enjoy mathematical art.

I was drawn to the painting below because it's obviously a Magritte homage - Magritte being my favorite artist.  Once I got near it I overheard the artist, Lidia Luquet, pointing out to another viewer that the apple was partly eaten, and I was immediately brought to the point of tears by the instant connection to the tragic prosecution, persecution and suicide of Alan Turing.

A closer look at the floorboards reveals not wood grain but information about the criminal ammendment (on the books from 1885 to 1967) under which he was prosecuted (Oscar Wilde having been the first person prosecuted under this ammendment).  This was on the right-hand side of the painting, the dark side away from the window.  On the floorboards on the left, in the light, are his mathematical works, including his WWII work on the Enigma Code.



Persi's talk at the conference: Carries, Group Theory, and Additive Combinatorics.

There was a wonderful selection of topics - combinatorics, topology, randomness, analysis, graph theory, group theory, etc.  Here is a sampling:







(Bob, the above two slides are for you, since you want to know about tensors!)

The above is what I'm always telling my students: "Make it Simpler!"  "State and Solve a Simpler Problem!"

There were lovely applications in the talk that the slide above was from - "Randomness and Order in Random Order" by Janko Gravener of UCD.

My sabbatical is focused on the history of mathematics from the Renaissance to the present, and this was definitely the present!  I learned about many open problems in each of these fields.  The freedom this sabbatical is affording me to read, to research, to attend conferences, to plan for travel, and, eventually, to travel is allowing me to learn so much and to be so inspired.  It was eye-opening to be at the conference having done all the reading I've done recently - especially with regard to the rise of modern algebra - and then to attend such interesting talks involving modern algebra (a topic I hadn't had opportunity to engage in for about 30 years!).  It was also striking to hear names, used in theorems, of people whose lives I have been reading about - Dirichlet, Cauchy, Hilbert, etc.  Their names are used as if they are still here - a colleague just down the hall.  "This is Dirichlet."  "This is, of course, Cauchy-Schwarz." "This part is Hilbert."  They absolutely live on in their work.

First Stop: Seattle

Though  my European travels do not begin until the end of March, I was able to do some traveling earlier this month relating to my sabbatical, and that was to attend the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) in Seattle.  The JMM is the largest math conference in the world (6090 attending) and is put on jointly by the American Mathematical Society and by the Mathematical Association of America.  It is partly the time I have open due to being on sabbatical that allowed me to attend this conference.













I found it to be quite different from other math conferences I had attended in the past (AMATYC, CMC^3, NCTM, etc.).  It was particularly hard to choose what sessions to go to, as there were 2805 of them to choose from over the course of four days!  They are grouped by classification, and though other topics interested me as well, I stuck nearly exclusively with talks about the history of mathematics.



I did sit in on a few talks on general topics or recreational mathematics as well.  (You can't beat it when Dr. Who shows up in a talk!)

Prior to attending this conference I joined a couple of other groups – the History of Mathematics Special Interest Group of the Mathematical Association of America (HOMSIGMAA) and the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences (ACMS).  Each held a reception and a special talk in the evening, and these are groups of folks I really wanted to make connections with.  In joining HOMSIGMAA I was automatically part of the listserv, and I’ve gotten a great deal of valuable information there in preparation for my European travels.  (This most recent is news of an exhibition in London on the life of John Dee that will be taking place while I am there – very exciting!)

I love the logo of the ACMS – an unfolded hypercube, which suggests (to me at least) Christ’s cross, higher dimensional reality, and mathematics - the language with which Galileo stated God has created the universe.   

Another evening event was the Backgammon night hosted by Art Benjamin, at which I really came to have a deep appreciation for a game that I had known only at a very shallow level previously.







 

I had some time one afternoon to check out the city;so many things caught my eye, and the following pictures are the result.  It's truly an interesting and beautiful city.