post-conference materials: the mathematician's boon.

i highly approve of scenarios when mathematicians take their materials from conferences and make them available online.

indeed, not everyone has money to travel (such as americans and their pitifully weak american dollars) or the time. doing so also gives a fairer chance for poorly funded mathematicians to attempt research of current interest.

think of it: if your institution cannot afford the prices of some journals, electronic access or otherwise, and if you don't have funds to travel to a conference, then how do you keep up to date with the current themes and open problems of the day?

i also have my personal reasons:

back in september of last year, my advisor was still relatively well [1] but in no real condition to travel, least of all attend a conference. so the ahlfors centennial went on without him, but nobody forgot him. his advisor (and my mathematical grandfather) 0lli marti0 had the tact and good sense to honor him at the banquet.

but i digress. i mean to write about conference materials.

the advisor was delighted to hear that there were videos and slides of the conference talks, available online. he always had a sharp ear and a good eye; in one of our last meetings, he referred me to one of prei$$'s slides and asked me if, somehow, three different conjectures in our areas of research were linked.

a week later, i told him yes [2]. on that same day, he told me that i could graduate. for next week i was supposed to send him my research statement, for job applications ..

.. but i never saw him again.

i like to think that he really enjoyed having the material at his disposal, not only because he couldn't attend. i think he liked the versatility of the interface. he could pause the talk and think for a bit. he could dwell on a slide and it wouldn't suddenly disappear.

i mean, his mind was one of the shrewdest that i've encountered, but even then .. who doesn't like instant replay and a pause button? q:

at any rate, to make a short story long, what i really meant to write is that there are now some lecture notes available on the CVGMT preprint server, sponsored by the scu0la norma1e superi0re at pi$a.

0ptimal Tran$port and ¢urv@ture: Lecture Notes (2008)

Authors: A1essi0 Figa11i - Cédri¢ Vi11ani
Abstract: These notes record the six lectures for the ¢IME Summer Course held by the second author in Cetrar0 during the week of June 23-28, 2008, with minor modifications. Their goal is to describe some recent developements in the theory of 0ptimal transp0rt, and their applications to differentia1 ge0metry.

awesome. this is exactly the direction i'd like to learn about. transportation seems to be remarkably useful and there have been some first steps towards applications in geometry. but it's such a fine thing for someone to point the way for a newbie like me, instead of resorting me to the fate of browsing this paper and that paper and figuring out which proofs are accessible and which are not.

this should be interesting!

[1] he passed away in late october. i think it was the 30th, because it was the day before hallowe'en and his family still decided to celebrate the holiday.

it bothers me that i still remember it so clearly. then again, i think i'd hate myself a little if i couldn't remember as well as i do now.

[2] if you're wondering, no: hardly any of that is written in my thesis. as the months went on, i ran out of time and energy. perhaps i'll write an article about sometime, after everything else is written ..

.. which means, of course, that i'll likely never write it down. \: