a day in the life: impromptu talks.

i think i'm developing a reputation for responsibility, punctuality, and good cheer ..

.. which, i fear, could very well lead to disaster!

the last thing i need is one more goal to juggle and meet,
and the potential fallout from if/when i drop the ball with something important.

maybe i should start breaking a few promises and failing to show up for a meeting or two .. you know, small things to keep my colleagues on their toes?

on a related note, i've been having a lot of meetings lately .. but more on that later.

---

so yesterday i addressed the department .. or at least a large chunk of it. of course, i didn't intend on this at all and had i known, i'd have most likely refused.

it all began when

showtime, before-&-after: slow to heal, some damage done.

// originally written: wednesday
// while tired/slightly irritable

ye gods, i (still) feel exhausted. i wish i could give my friday talk today, just to get it over with.

having another talk to think about seems to diminish my capacities. i know many people who take on such commitments as if they were appointments to the dentist; like those cases, there's little to no stress. one just brushes a little better than usual, maybe try out flossing, and make it to the office on time.

i've never been able to do that. i don't know why.

this reminds me of my days from school, where i used to run track-&-field. the tournaments where i was scheduled to run two events were always stressful ones:

when the events were too close together, then i'd inevitably run one of them badly. if i pushed hard on the first one, then i would feel dead during the second; if i wanted to do really well in the second event, then i'd have to throw the first race.

i don't know if other kids had the same problem. then again, i never seemed to heal or recover particularly quickly.

when the events were spread apart, say one in the morning and one in the afternoon, then it would just be a long, drawn-out affair. is it better to stay limber between events, or just "shut down" completely and then do a new, second warmup for the second event?

the time in between just seemed lost to me .. though that didn't bother too many of my teammates. again, i don't know why.

it must really be a matter of biology .. or maybe psychology. personality?

// originally written: thursday,
// while slightly less tired.

the same problems are recurring:

there's too much background,
the discussion is rather technical ..

i don't know how i'll say anything intelligible tomorrow,
and i mightn't get to the really cool geometry part at all ..!

/sighs/

on the bright side, there's no dearth of things to talk about. /-:

// written: friday (today),
// while noticeably more tired.

ye gods: i felt awful during today's talk.

talk neuroses: more matter, with less art.

.. since brevity is the soul of wit ..

i'm still thinking through the first talk that i'll give this week. i'm weighing how to say what i want to say without writing technical details at top speed for 2 x 45min.

in case it isn't already clear, this is the first time i'll be giving this particular talk. it makes situation slightly loaded, i guess.

until recently i've been obsessed with writing up the associated preprint, which is almost done. (i might even submit it this week.)

the abstract i wrote is rather vague, though, which means that there's no need to keep my word and i can essentially talk about what i want. as for the title, i guess i have to stick to certain subjects, like GMT and metric geometry ..

.. which is slightly scary.

.. but this above all, to thine own self be true,
and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man ..

i still feel like i don't know any GMT, which in most cases is fine. speaking with a colleague last week, though, she seemed rather interested in the talk .. which means that she might attend and bring her colleagues who do study GMT along ..!

/sighs/
so now i have to know some GMT .. and explain why my non-standard version of a standard construction makes sense in this one setting.

there is one more thing, though, that worries me.

budgeting topics for a talk is like packing a weirdly-partitioned backpack with ill-fitting objects.

// initially posted on sat, 6 oct 2012

so i have $C = 16$ pages to write (by hand) for next week.  if you think of $C$ as a quantitative constant, then it depends on the following parameters:

$C = 4C'$, where $4$ is the average rate of pages* per hour i can discuss,
$C'=2C_{\rm talk}$, with $C'$ the number of talks i'm giving next week, and
$C_{\rm talk} = 2^{**}$ is the length of a typical talk in a finnish seminar.

the good thing is that i already have both punchlines in mind, so each talk outline essentially writes itself.  i don't think i can fit in all that i want to say, though, which for me is normal.

in my talks, i always run out of time. /sighs/

the constraints are the usual ones for presentations ..

various components of the talks depend on each other, of course.  if i don't add this one part to the exposition, then later on, another part won't make sense at all ..

meanwhile, the point of the main result is that it has this nice application, as advertised by the title .. but to explain it would probably take a precious 1¹/₂ pages ..!

/sighs/

i hate making choices, deciding what is important.  i always have this fear that i'm making the wrong choice.

// added later, the same day.

when i think about it, these are just talks. i don't know why i'm so wound up about them. i've given dozens of them over the years; sure, there have been some bad ones, but there were plenty of good ones, too.

maybe in having no teaching duties this year (and hence, no recent feeling for what is "reasonable" in a lecture) i've gone to over-thinking a lot of it, dwelling on things that i wouldn't usually dwell on.

not more than a year ago, i wrote twice as many pages per week for the lectures i was giving .. and i rarely worried about any of it.


* = this iaccounts for "simple" pages, which are handwritten analogues of slide #1 or #2 (i.e. basic definitions)
** = 1 lecture hour = 45 minutes.

show's over, folks: it's time for a new act.

i feel like i've gone on a kind of speaking tour, across various cities in finland:

jyväskylä and espoo in october,
lappeenranta and helsinki in january,
espoo again in february,
helsinki again, this month; also turku. [1]

it's a fine thing to travel within finland, because the train becomes a viable option.  on a related note, i'm starting to hate airplanes.

---

it was a good april, which i spent not traveling.  i worked steadily, went back to reading, and became frustrated with new ideas.  strange as it sounds, i think that's fine .. maybe even the way it should be, for a mathematician. [2]

having gone back "on the road" this and last week, i've realised something: it's not just the traveling.  there was and is an additional, wearying aspect that's interwoven into these trips.

it's not been so many times, but i've nonetheless lost count of how many times i've given this particular talk about measurablε differentιable structures.  it's in my head now and i can deliver it well .. maybe a little too well.

today i realised that it would take another half-hour to fully explain some details, so on the fly i came up with a new, more succinct sketch of the ideas involved.

in particular, i drew many diagrams and pointed at them a lot.

nobody complained,
but it's not clear to me how much of the audience i lost.

there was a period in my life when i attempted to give every talk only once .. foolish, i know .. but i like to think that my intentions were honest and of the good:

it's similar to my current rule, that i have something new to talk about, every semester: the point is to stay active in research, to keep moving, to keep creating.

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
~ t.s. eliot

so i think i'm getting complacent.

i still like the ideas in the paper i wrote, but giving the related talk poses no real challenge anymore.  i don't get as excited about presenting the details again, and that isn't very fair to the audience.

if i can't get as excited as before, as i would like,
then how can i expect an audience to be interested in what i have to say?

it doesn't seem honest, not anymore .. which is why i'm shelving this talk from now on.  so unless a colleague invites me and explicitly requests this talk, i plan to never give it again.

it was a good, long run and i think my audiences enjoyed it well enough.  like a good comedian, though, it's only right that i come up with new material .. (-:

Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

[1] 10 talks in 8 months, accounting for madrid and the united states, too. everyone tells me that i'm young and that i should travel a lot when i can .. but ye gods: it's exhausting.

[2] frustrated is probably the wrong word, here.  what i mean is: just as a writer is one who writes, edits, and rewrites, a mathematician should ponder, innovate, polish, and write.  

to my credit, i wasn't wrong.

remember when i said that "by the end, i'll have given 3 talks in 3 weeks?"

well, that's still true [1];
it's just that the plan has changed.

by the end of this week and next, i'll have given 5 talks in 5 weeks ..

*sighs*

it's my own fault, really: a problem with saying no, my sense of do-goodery [2] .. that sort of thing.  more precisely,

this week's talk is a continuation of last week's, after the seminar organiser suspected that i had more to say and suggested that i could take my time with the topic.

next week's talk is actually an expositional one.  it's meant to give the background for other speakers, who otherwise have only 20-25 minutes each for their talks.

[1] sometimes i tell people that i have a sister, which is true.  it is also true, however, that i have more than one sister. (-:

[2] .. and yes, "do-goodery" is an actual word.

dr. strange-talk (or how i stopped worrying and love my audience)

i've been giving a lot of talks lately.

after tomorrow, it will have been three talks in three weeks [1];
on top of that, each talk is newly written [2].

it's getting a little tiring [3] ..
.. and yes, i promise to stop with the footnotes now .. for a while, at least. q-:

---

if i've learned anything about giving talks in the last few weeks and months, it's that there is a trade-off at work:

1. you can either be clear and never get through all you wanted to say;
2. you can plow on, say what you want to say, lose more than half the audience, and probably go overtime.

(this isn't even accounting for questions from the audience, in the middle of the talk.  for some reason, this happens to me all the time.)

anyway, i've opted for option #1.  the operative word here, though, is all.  at this point, i think i'm already doing well if the audience actually remembers something from my talk.

let's face it:

metric spaces make a pretty abstract setting.  most people know this area as a playground for topologists and occasionally, gromov.  other than that, it's a bit mysterious.

like any other field of mathematics, it gets very technical very quickly.  if the audience is full of specialists, then sure: i can say what i want to say.

being a newish field, though, i've been reminded and re-reminded that apart from my immediate colleagues, nobody has ever heard of this stuff ..

*sighs*

there's also the context to consider:

at a conference or workshop, it's safe to assume that your audience is tired from the rigors of travel and stress.  besides, they're probably preoccupied with their own talks .. so half of them are probably not listening.

a quarter of them are probably confused by one of your first four definitions .. and if you're using slides, then they will be lost for the remainder of your talk. [4]

i think i'm being generous, here.

every one of these aspects is familiar to me.  i may be a rather unique (read: strange) person, but i like to think that some of my experience and bias is kin to others'.

---

this sounds like i'm giving up, but i'm not.  it's just that my expectations have changed.

i liken it to having taught undergrads for a while, planning for the possibility that some students will be curious about the subject, but being aware that most of them just want to get through the class.

it's not their fault: they want to do something else in life, and prefer to be curious about other things.

to think otherwise sounds like complaining about why the entire audience doesn't specialise in your field.

the only difference between you and your students is that you happen to have a ph.d. and suffered your share of misery for your achievement.

they, of course, have not: among other reasons, it's usually because they're younger than you.

that said, i know that tomorrow is my talk, that i will not get through half of what i wanted to discuss, but that doesn't matter.

i'm going to have fun.

i'll try to say why i think this stuff is cool,
give an idea of why it's hard,
and an idea of why the proof should work.

anyway, i still have a few pages to write .. so: back to it!








[1] a more precise count would be 2 weeks and 2 days, but my point persists.

[2] somehow it doesn't seem fair to use slides, if i am given two hours to talk.  what's the hurry?  as i told a colleague recently, i can think as fast as a chalkboard, but not as fast as a computer.

[3] to clarify, i mean "tiring" and not "tiresome" .. though audience members might agree with both.  you'll have to ask them. (-;

[4] odds are that few, if any, of us have thought about repeating a slide later on, just to remind the audience of an important technical point.  this is rarely a problem with chalkboards, of course ..


chalkboards: 1, slides: 0  .. ho ho!

not the usual kind of interview question, but ..

today someone complimented me on my suit and asked me if i did my own ironing .. which was flattering, but .. startling.

.. but yes, i ended up deciding on wearing a suit to day one of the interview.. but i stopped short of wearing a tie.  having never given a talk while wearing a tie, i thought it best not to have anything resembling a noose around my neck, especially if i encounter a firing squad of "this isn't clear" kinds of questions ..

.. which happened anyway.

somehow i planned for 23 slides (not counting pauses) in 50 minutes, with some slides intended to be quick ones to clarify the notation.  probably i got through 14-15 .. which is good enough:

i told a robust enough story,
explained a few definitions by way of concrete examples,
and advertised my results.

somehow i picked up this rule about jobs talks: you should never end early, which seems contrary to the advice that as long as you don't go overtime, then you are fine.

*shrugs*

oh well.  at least i didn't dress too badly for the occasion .. (-:

a talk, a flight, another flight .. another talk.

ye gods, i'm giving another talk. by the time this is over, it will be three weeks in a row of giving talks. there's a bit more pressure for this upcoming one, though.

it's a job talk.

---

i feel overwhelmed.

my interview was moved up one week. so instead of 1.5 weeks to settle everything, meet my commitments, and prepare for the inteview, it's instead become a few days. part of me wonders how fair this is, but i'm not holding the cards in this game.

i came back from spain on saturday afternoon; today i fly out.

i feel unprepared.

my talk's not finished yet, not by half. with 3+8 hours of flight time, though, i'm hoping to have it finished before the captain announces to us "to turn off all electronic devices before landing."

that's not a problem. i've been under tighter spots before. it's everything else.

---

i'm tired from the conference, from meeting and talking to new people all the time. i want to go back to work, finish that preprint, resubmit another preprint, start on the new things that i promised others that i would.

i want to be a mathematician again.

by tomorrow i have to be on my best behavior: friendly, receptive, ready. it's not that i consider myself a degenerate -- not a complete one, anyway -- but like many mathematicians i'm an introvert. it takes me a great effort to be outward and actively be nice to people. it's getting harder, every year.

i'm dreading the onslaught of questions -- both those that they will ask me and those that i'm supposed to ask them. i don't know what to ask, other than the obvious ones. i'm already amazed that i made it to the shortlist and their department deigns to talk to me ..!

i'm tired and i want to go home.
 the problem is that i don't have a home anymore.

 i haven't had one in a very long time.

---

i also misread my flight times. i thought my flight today was 4pm, but that's my return trip. it was 11:30am that, printing out my itinerary, i realised that takeoff is instead at 1:55pm ..

*sighs*

so if i'm lucky, i'll arrive to the airport 45 minutes before takeoff. i don't know if they'll let me board, but the first leg is within Europe and maybe they won't be so picky about intercontinental rules.

i have to try;
i don't know what i'm doing anymore,
i don't know the odds of success,
but i know i have to try.

it's the only thing left that i can do.

---

epilogue: they checked me in with 40 minutes to go, before takeoff .. which was anyway delayed because of the plane's late arrival ..


.. so i guess it's time to finish that talk ..!

the more things stay the same, the more they change.

so tomorrow is the fourth [1] time that i'll be giving this particular talk, regarding differentιable structures on metrιc spaces. i'm hoping that it will be the last, for a little while.

call me paranoid, but i feel uneasy when i talk about the same thing too often; i worry that i'm not getting new ideas or making enough progress on my research.

some of my colleagues have attended this same talk several times, those poor souls .. but i think i see their motivations. i've done the same thing myself. at least for me, it's hard for me to learn something new in the short span of a talk, even if it is a 2-hour period, so often a good talk is worth hearing again.

once, this caused no end of confusion:

it was right after my ph.d. defense, and there were two back-to-back conferences. i was worried that i'd bore my colleagues to death by giving my thesis talk twice. so in one i stuck to my thesis, and in the other i discussed a completely different project in preparation.

makes sense, right?
besides, maybe people will be impressed at my versatility ..! [2]

of course, i was wrong. once i told my colleagues, they were alarmed and made a fuss about it. you see, both conferences held parallel sessions of contributed talks, and my talk was running opposite a well-known and prominent researcher in my field. so a lot of people, expecting to hear it next week, skipped my talk and went to his.

*sighs*
oh well; we're all young and stupid for once in our lives, right?

---

so i've learned my lesson .. somewhat. i still can't bring myself to give the exact same talk. besides, i've not yet given the version of the talk that i wanted!

you see, the driving mechanism behind the theorem consists of genuinely new techniques for dοubling metrιc spaces, which are inherently geοmetric in nature. in every past talk, i've spent too much time expositing and only hinted at this.

perhaps it's a risky proposition to discuss techniques of proof during a seminar, but i want to show the audience why the theorem is actually geοmetric.

the seminar is two hours long (2 x 45min), which must be enough time if i forgo the pleasantries. i think i will say a lot and write little, at least regarding the parts that should be "well-known."

at any rate, after this i'm retiring the talk for a while. besides, there's this new project that i want to talk about instead, in mid-february .. (-:

anyways, i'm rewriting part 2 of the talk now. back to work!



[1] it also depends on how you count. last march i talked about it at an AMS Special Session, but i had promised different things in the abstract and only advertised the theorem. besides, it was a weaker theorem then.

[2] thinking back, it was a particularly stupid decision on my part. i ended up writing and preparing two talks where i could have written one. to add to the context: this was also during the three weeks that my thesis corrections were due, and time was very much a factor ..!

jet lag does not make for good talks.

well, by finland time it is now friday.  i may have failed to meet my new year's resolution last week, but the spirit of it is still strong.  oddly enough, i also have something to say.

(to be fair, i jotted this down last weekend in a cafe, but some thoughts are new-ish and worth sharing.)

---

on thursday afternoon (last week) i gave a talk.  it wasn't the worst one i've given and i didn't go over my time limit, which is good.  if i've learned anything, though ..

.. never, ever underestimate the afflictions that jet lag can bring.  i'm starting to think that sleep medications and/or vitamin and mineral supplements may be worth the trouble.

earlier that morning i woke up at 3:30, despite feeling very tired at midnight.  i couldn't go back to sleep, so i did what seemed like a good idea at the time ..

.. and went running outside for a few miles.

in retrospect, of course, it wasn't a good idea.  at that point the fluffy, fine snow became weak ice and an unescapable slush; the way was slippery, dark, and uneasy at times.

as the speaker before me settled into the final slides of a proof sketch, i remember my pulse starting to quicken a little.  though i've given a version of the talk before, i didn't feel wholly prepared.  every other time was a 2-hour version on the chalkboard, at a pace that i could set myself.

the trouble with slides is that, in some sense, your fate is sealed.

the presentation is pre-meditated by the very choice of medium.  unlike a chalkboard, you can't suddenly follow a natural flow; there's little (if any) room left for improvisation [1].

imagine asking the audience to wait a moment while you recompile your LaTeX! (-:

perhaps the best analogy is that of a stage production, in that you have to remember how the slides go.  in other words, you have to remember your lines.

---

the jet lag, however, caused me so much drowsiness that i couldn't summon a panic, so i wasn't (visibly) nervous [2].  on the other hand, i unintentionally acquired too much material to discuss ..

.. yes, i mean "acquired."

that probably warrants an explanation, which is below.

i was also so drowsy that i couldn't remember the exact order and content of my slides, despite having prepared them a few nights before and revised them after my very-early-morning run.

the very last slide was somewhat technical and required a few subtle details.  i became paranoid about forgetting the right ones ..

.. so during the talk, i started a painful descent into an information overload: at every slide, i'd follow the narrative and then give a series of additional details ..

.. sometimes examples and at other times, remarks about the proof ..

.. because, or so i reasoned:
if i give all the details, then i can't possibly miss the crucial ones!

*sighs*
to be fair, i was tired and jet-lagged and had no business giving a talk.

now that i think about it, it's a wonder that i actually ended on time .. rather, there's a very clear but unsavory reason:

upon reaching the final, technical slide, i realised that there wasn't enough time left to discuss it properly.  so i cut my losses, clicked through it, and gave a verbal summary instead ..

.. all the while pointing at various terms of an estimate that were probably nonsensical to everyone but me.

---

so the problem was that half of the audience knew the background, could have arrived 10 minutes late into the talk, and not missed anything.  i must have bored them terribly.

as for the other half, i couldn't really tell; i've always found it hard to read faces, especially for looks of comprehension.


epilogue. a friend who was in the audience later told me that the classroom was full when i gave my talk.  some people were standing in the back, in fact. this only made me feel uneasy about the whole thing. \-:


discussing these thoughts later,

on the plus side, a colleague who gave a later talk was spared the pain of giving too many definitions, because i had already covered them. (-:


[1] one can very easily argue the opposite, of course.  some of my colleagues have pointed out that it can be equally hard to remember the whole talk in its entirety, even with written notes as an aid.  good, polished slides are therefore like a guarantee that something polished gets delivered to the audience.

[2] sometimes i think that years of running 5K races and 800m dashes in high school track-&-field has normalised the onset of adrenaline, for me.

after & before: part two.

i can't remember when i first drafted this, but it was probably the day before my second talk (at TKK) which was .. one and a half weeks ago already.

---

i'm uneasy about most topics.

when i give talks about generalizations of the schοenflies problem or Sobolev extensiοn domains or ΡDEs, i get quite anxious, and with good reason. [0]

these are well-established topics with much history to them.  try as i might, i always seem to be ignorant of some significant part of the literature .. and in particular, what types of theorems or proofs are "standard." [1]

---

when i talk about my "geοmetric" work, however .. and by this i mean this stuff relating to (metric) derivatiοns .. then the situation changes completely.

it would be wrong to say that i am an expert on the subject, if only because there are plenty of things that i don't understand about them.  it's safe to say, however, that nobody is an expert, either!

i guess that makes me a little like socrates [2] .. (-:

it's not that i insist on knowing more than everyone else in the room; i've resigned myself to the fact that there is always someone smarter or more familiar with the literature.

rather, it's the matter that if i make a mistake, then the fallout is minor.  like everyone else, i hate it when people criticise me by my mistakes .. even if i do deserve it, sometimes.

---

there's another aspect about derivatiοns worth mentioning, as the topic of a talk:

if this is a subject little-known, then my role can be put to good use.  there are few references on the subject, so i can point out how the theory works.  doing so, perhaps i can convince others that the theory can be put to good use.

put one way, a beautiful theory is like a night sky: a canvas of stars that is well-arranged by Nature's Benevolence, distant but worthy of contemplation.

a useful theory, however, is more like a clutter of heavy stones in a field, perhaps meteors comedown to earth, long ago.  stone, despite being crude and ugly matter, are fodder for tools and building material.  from them we form homes and towns, societies and civilizations. [3]

i don't believe that mathematics is always beautiful.

look hard enough at the details of a theory, and it becomes hard to see any beauty in them.  sometimes i wonder if the notion of beauty is inherently retrospective .. in the intellectual sense, anyway.



[0] there was this one talk i gave about manifolds with non-negatιve Riccι curνature, some years ago.  my plan was to learn a setting in which you can actually prove the validity of a Pοincaré inequality (vs. most of the time it is taken as a hypothesis).  it wasn't until i started discussing the proof, that the audience pointed out an error to me .. which lay in the textbook i used, but the fact remains that i missed it completely .. [sighs]

[1] oddly enough, most of my non-geοmetric work is collaborative, especially the stuff relating to ΡDEs and Sobοlev spaces.  This cannot be a mere coincidence.. \-:

[2] according to legend, a man from athens traveled to see the oracle at delphi and asked: "who is the wisest man in all of athens?"  unlike the usual cryptic answers, the oracle simply answered, "socrates."


upon hearing the news, socrates became disillusioned instead of delighted, because he couldn't believe that he knew more than every other athenian.  so began a long and systematic inquiry: socrates found experts on every subject he could think of and began to debate with them, and after a while each expert admitted that he, too, knew nothing.


this put socrates into a further melancholy.  he discovered that nobody knew anything ..


.. until one day, while taking a stroll, it occurred to socrates: nobody knew anything, but he himself knew that nobody knew anything.  this meant that he indeed knew something.  since everyone else he encountered knew nothing, it meant that he was the wisest man in athens, after all ..

[3] i've been reading thoreau's walking lately ..

after & before: part one.

so i gave another talk today, this time in my department.  the topic was the same .. regarding differentiability in a certain class of metric spaces.

originally i wrote down some thoughts while writing the talk, but right now it seems more natural to talk about how it went.

---

the good news is that it was well-received:
all signs point to that, at any rate.

the bad news is that it didn't go the way that i wanted.  something didn't feel right when i was talking, and i'm almost sure that i went too fast.  there were enough clues, i think, as to pick up the basic trail of the argument ..

.. but, admittedly, i was often looking at my watch, seeing if there was still enough time.

so: i prepared too much.
it actually reminds me of a film called wonder boys [1] ..

[link to imdb entry]

the basic premise is that the main character, a literature prof, cannot finish the book that he's writing: the pages number in the thousands.  at one point, one of his students reads the draft without his permission, gives her critique.  the message is essentially this:

good writing is about making choices.  this thing .. it doesn't look like you made any choices.  you follow every lead, the tangent of every story of every character ..

the fault of the talk is that i made a similar mistake.  what i had in mind was (essentially) a complete discussion, but even in 2-hour finnish style seminars, there still isn't sufficient time.

put otherwise, it's not that i didn't have enough time;
rather, the talk just wasn't well-organised, the message not appropriately succinct [2].

---

epilogue. afterwards, a few people came and asked a few questions.

the striking thing is that, despite the metric space setting of the discussion, i was asked instead about Lie groups, as well as Riemannian manifolds ..!

sometimes i wonder whether metric spaces are really a good field of analysis in which to work.  maybe i should concentrate on more familiar settings .. if anything, i might be able to communicate with more mathematicians ..

[shrugs]



[1] interestingly enough, it's set in pittsburgh.  the story is modest, but it's told well.

[2] "i didn't have time to write you a short letter, so i wrote a long one instead .." ~ mark twain.

before, then, and after.

tuesday: i don't often say this, but i have a good feeling about this talk.  it might even be fun!

wednesday afternoon: ye gods.  this is the analysιs seminar, right?  it looks like the audience for a colloquium.  i've seen entire maths departments that are smaller than this ..

.. oh well: here goes nothing ..!

wednesday evening:  well, maybe 4 pages per hour [1] was a bit ambitious, especially for a chalkboard talk.  it was only after writing out the maths in chalk that i realised how technical the discussion really was.

still, i think that the talk was received well, and colleagues of mine had good things to say about the result.

when i was younger, i used to be deathly nervous of questions.  ultimately, i realised: if people are asking questions, then it means that they are listening, even willing to understand.

so questions are a good sign, after all.  besides, if you can't address the questions of the audience, then you probably didn't prepare enough for it ..

.. so: fair's fair. i've had my share of that. q-:



[1] read: "1 hour" = 45 minutes

something old, something new, something borrowed ..

it's always been a goal of mine to give a new talk at each conference.

it's a sufficient measurement of research productivity:

if i have something new to say every year (or more often) then at least i am not "dead" [1] as a researcher ..

at any rate, today was the deadline for title/abstracts for the ams sectional meeting at statesboro, ga.

this time, i think i'll have to compromise. i'll talk about some old results. if i can work out this conjecture, then perhaps i'll say something new after all .. which might therefore count as a "new" talk.

here's hoping, anyway. \:

[1] oddly enough, here i mean "dead" in the erdös sense.

in which i leave my fate to chance (epilogue added).

this has been a strange conference. the talks have mostly been expositions, not the original research of the speakers.

i don't mind it; in fact i quite like it. some topics are old and i haven't thought of them in a while, others are quite new and i am learning new things. it reminds me (and rightly so, as the organizers tell me) of "thursday seminars" of yore. rarely do i hear old friends and colleagues speak for longer than the restriction of 20 minutes at a conference ..

.. in science, i suppose they would call it a journal club.

i had known some weeks in advance that my talk would be part 3 of a 3-part series, but all week i had been fretting and editing, in reaction to what other speakers have discussed. tonight, at 9am i stopped, went downstairs, and started singing karaoke to a live guitar that a friend played until 1am. (there was also a bit of beer.)

it was then that i realised: f-ck. i have 10 pages or so of notes. by standard scales, that 100 minutes of talking: impossible! it also occurred to me that i had many topics, and it shouldn't my decision to choose what is relevant for the audience: rather, the audience should choose.

so i left a 1 euro coin with a colleague to-night; tomorrow i poll the audience: what do you want to hear? if there is no vote, then i flip the coin and decide what to talk about, for 50 minutes!

---

epilogue. in the end, i ran out of time. in 65 minutes i covered 5 pages; i had forgotten that this crowd loves to ask questions (and besides, my presentation style was sloppy).

i later apologized to some of the participants for going so slowly. they simply blinked, and said that i was going quite fast.

these are my colleagues; imagine, then, how my students are faring ..!

more thoughts, while visiting.

it's energizing to be among postdocs and fellow visitors in the same research area. i feel more productive, like i'm thinking more.

i guess i'm still used to being in a bigger department, despite having been away from one for 2+ years.

to clarify, i don't mean that every idea is a good one. despite this, i think it a good sign, from several viewpoints:

an optimist will say that the more ideas there are, the more good ideas there are.

a pessimist might begrudge you that if all of your ideas are working, then you're not getting enough ideas.

seminars require willpower to work. the members must sacrifice a little time and effort for a greater good.

i remember attending 4-5 seminars weekly as a graduate student. this also meant that i'd give 3 expository seminar talks per term .. which was fine. i learned the talk subjects better than if i had leafed through books and papers, at any rate.

one has to develop a seminar culture, though. for this term, our analysis seminar is dead in the water. (maybe we can change that, for the spring.)


next time i'll talk as early as possible.

it's good to get out of the way. there's another benefit, i suppose: the sooner people know your results, the sooner discussions ensue.

at any rate, today was my talk, which wasn't a disaster.

seeing (a) unfamiliar faces, (b) familiar faces whose corresponding minds don't study metric spaces, and (c) students in the crowd, i became paranoid about giving an accessible talk. so i indulged in 10-15 minutes of discussing the relevant hypotheses on metrιc measμre spacεs.

i think it hurt me in the end, though: i rushed through a technical part in the last few minutes. then again, by the end of a 50-minute talk, who knows if anyone was listening?

a fellow visitor asked me about my talk. i thought she was just being nice, but then she asked about ptwise Lipschιtz extensions and p-harmonic functions!

to further clarify: this was a geometric group theοorist and today i wasn't talking about anything related to ΡDE. it was both surprising and really cool.

(abstractly it occurred to me that lipschitz extensions could be used in geometry, but it never occurred to me that someone would actually ask me.)

here and there.

so this past weekend was an ΑMS sectional meeting. of the last 72 hours, i spent at least 12 of them in a car, to and from the conference site.

in contrast, i don't think i slept more than 15 hours in that same period. on top of a different bed than usual -- two days isn't much time to get used to it -- i couldn't help but shake the feeling that my talk would be a disaster.

had i known that my talk would be that bad and error-prone, i'd have let fate run its course and gotten more sleep.

in retrospect, i shouldn't have promised a new talk. i don't know what i was thinking. [1]

plenty of speakers used talks from before .. perhaps with new results added .. but when i think about it, their actions didn't bother me. for some talks i was glad to hear them again, try to get it right in my head.

oh well: so i'm a laughingstock for a while;
after the new year, it will all be somewhat forgotten. \-:

on a related note, it's not easy to lateχ in a car.

the daylight causes terrible glare,
the darkness makes you squint at faint letters on the screen.

the laptop is, for once, on your lap and the angle of sight is new and strange on my neck.

also, it's bumpy.

no matter. i won't be traveling again for ..

[blinks]
another month.

forget cars, this time: i should book that plane ticket soon ..

[1] actually, i do remember: it was meant to get the project on the road to completion. if i talk about those joint results (which i did) then colleagues will ask me when the preprint will be ready (which one did). the ensuing guilt could only urge me to move ahead on it.

the conference, so far.

admittedly, i have this minor type of distrust when it comes to close mathematical colleagues. if they tell me that they liked a talk i gave, then i would like to believe them ..

.. but i cannot.
i still consider the possibility that they are just being supportive or nice.

perhaps they know how neurotic i am and unconsciously they want to placate me -- hence they do not lie, but they may exaggerate. this is possible.

however, this suspicious reasoning fails if a complete stranger walks up to me and says the same things. this happened today -- mine was even the last talk, too, which is always the most painful one to sit through -- so i think i must accept that it was a good talk.

i received a few questions, some which took a little while to answer. nonetheless it was fun to answer them.

maybe all that time writing a thesis has colored my opinions. i don't expect others to like the objects that i study, because they are no longer as exciting as i once thought they were. i'll still study them for a while, but having written and (re-)edited dozens of pages about derιvatiοns, i've had my fill of them.

---

this has been an interesting conference already. i've met all sorts of people, including friends of friends. in particular, i keep meeting students of one particular mathematician, but i've still not met that mathematician himself!

(actually, that goes for a few mathematicians.)

i'm being exposed to new ideas. just today i finally learned what a baιre-1 function is and what a Darbοux function is. in a talk i heard about a Banach space construction motivated by seeking mathematical foundations for the feyηman paτh integral.

strangely enough, i also spoke with one prof about a geometric problem with some application to Lιe grοup representatιοns. it just sort of happened. perhaps he misheard me: i said that i was interested in geοmetric measurε theοry, and maybe he heard ge0metry instead. nice guy, though, and his ideas are interesting.

it's nice to absorb truly new things, for a little while. it's nice not to be completely myself for a while.

well, it's over.

i stand by what i said before:

      "i like the math in this talk;
      it's a good story."

i just wish that it was someone else who tells the story of the schoenflies problem and its various incarnations.

i love telling stories, but i'm no good at storytelling.

---

as you can imagine, the usual process happened:

1. days before, i am excited about giving a talk and the mathematics involved. i think of how cool the theorems are.
   
   
2. the day of the talk, i'm nervous and worried that something is amiss, that it's all wrong, and that i'll forget to say subtleties that matter to me.
   
   indeed, i will forget to say them. i always do.
   
   
3. after the talk, i realise that i've forgotten again: i hate giving talks. it never goes as well as i would like.

oh well. at least my friend (who talked at the same time, in a parallel session) won most of the audience. truth be told, i wanted to hear what he would say.

sometimes talks do get in the way of a conference .. \: