- meet the authors of papers that i've read, and discuss some ideas with them;
- see the adviser again, and ask for advice;
- see a postdoc acquaintance and talk some math.
for 1: (X).
at a conference, everyone's out to meet someone, whether you already know them or not. the more important you are, the more likely you will be busy with co-authors and ambitious youngsters. here, tact is useless against persistence and insistence. so i learned that i have neither of those latter two qualities, or not enough of them.
so i did meet some of those authors/mathematicians, but never discussed much math with them. since it was formulated as an AND statement, it's safe to call this a failure; hence, the (X).
in some sense, conference social dynamics are a little like high school dynamics or prison dynamics. in the first few days, critical cliques form and they are nigh-impossible to break.
good luck, if you want to meet someone on day 3 of a conference (unless it's the last day and everyone's reveling). the acquaintances you make are fun and friendly, and the big shots are always busy.
for 2: (X)
i have the worst luck in the world.
the fellow grad students in my research group and the fellow (some former) students i know from other universities, they chose appropriately and attended a summer school, which happens to be the same town where the adviser was. as an untimely choice, i pick the wrong conference to attend, and become a stranger in a strange land, for a while.
others pay their visits, and then one week passes: the helsinki conference. i have an extra day to make the trip north to see the adviser -- but as it happens, the adviser's not taking any more visitors and will be flying out (by med-evac plane) to michigan, before conference end.
well, the adviser is now in MI and so am i. i guess he'll get back to me, or i'll get back to him; he has plenty of treatment and recovery to come, and there's no sense in my interrupting that.
for 3: (X).
i did see him, but we ended up talking only a little. i don't have any ideas ready, and at the stage they sat then, they weren't worth mentioning in discussion ..
.. especially in light of my fellow students (same research group) who have better, more disseminate ideas. time is short, and chances of meetings are few. let the best ideas win, i say; i'll get back to him, or anyone, when i have better (or good enough) ideas.
oh well. i guess conference resolutions are a bit like new year's resolutions. maybe i shouldn't have made any.
i still don't know if it was worth crossing the pond, this time around. i'm getting worse at traveling and i'm not getting any smarter or any good ideas.
sometimes i don't know anymore.
5 comments:
1) The cliques that can be observed at a conference probably formed before it started. Next time, try emailing the people you want to talk with ahead of time. Say you have some ideas about where that paper of theirs can lead, and would they mind discussing this at the conference. Then they *may* feel obliged to talk to you.
That being said, there's a chance that those people are simply tired of talking about their 5+ year project.
3) I'm pretty sure that postdoctoral acquaintance wasn't me. You wouldn't discuss the W^{2,p} problem with me no matter how I tried. ;)
1) emails in advance: you know, that just might work. thanks for the tip.
3) nah, it wasn't you, L. maybe at some point our interests will coincide, and we'll do some math together.
[thinks]
more likely, you would be doing the math, i would nod and try to understand you, and you'd insist on sharing the credit. q:
3') as for that W^{2,p} problem, it boils down to calculus and isn't terribly interesting. the digressions might be entertaining, but of the 1+ year(s) i spent on that problem, i'd say that 1-2 months consisted of "new and original" math that wasn't there before. almost all of it was already done by morse, huebsch, gehring, milnor, hirsch, martio, pavlovic(h), heinonen, etc.
ultimately, if that paper ever gets written, it will look more like a survey article than a research article, and all things being equal, a younger man doesn't have the history in mind and should not write it.
You know, your blog makes me feel completely useless very often. My goals for the conference were: to meet a lot of old friends and maybe some new ones, have a lot of fun and maybe understand something of some talk.
I was able to achieve all my goals but it doesn't make me any better as a mathematician. Your goals alone would be a victory to me. :)
as i've told younger folks,
goals only mean something if you can fulfill them; otherwise they are just another source of depression.
maybe i'm paraphrasing myself, but i must have said something like that, once. it's also why i try and avoid talking to younger students; they can become embittered by themselves.
on a related note, i know for certain that i have also said,
it can be a dangerous thing to want something.
it can be a dangerous thing to want something.
Oh, certainly. And isn't wanting something always what we live for?
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