another conference, day 5: disappointment.

so i learned some bad news yesterday:

..!
*sighs*

maybe i should have known better,
having been aware that he has done this kind of thing before;

maybe, though, there's a good reason.

there were other talks that i was looking forward to, but .. this was the one talk that i was truly, truly anticipating and among the main reasons why i chose to attend this conference.

of course, he cancels .. while the conference is in progress!

another conference, day 3: mostly photos.

being a conference of close to 1000 participants, i was expecting every square centimeter of the host building to be occupied .. but i was pleasantly wrong.

in particular, the fourth floor is almost always empty, even though you can hear the remaining three floors quite well (and in fact, observe the crowds from a height).

when i think about it, though, it makes sense: no coffee is served on the fourth floor! (-:

on a more serious note: despite encountering old friends and making new acquaintances here, i'm getting a little tired of people. there's not a lot of solitude made convenient to conference participants .. at least, not without heading far away from the conference venue.

then again, the whole point of a conference is to meet up and talk with colleagues, whether it's discussing research or simply sharing information or experiences about the life of working mathematicians! so i guess i've just not gotten into the conference mood yet ..

.. and knowing my luck, by the time that i will, the conference will be over .. \-:

lastly, a few photos from the book display center: among other things, apparently elsevier is trying to restore its good name.

another conference, day 2: breaking bad habits.

this sounds like sacrilege, but i'm considering switching from coffee to tea .. at least for conference afternoons.

the trouble is that patience wears thin, after a few talks, so coffee breaks become highly valued.  when walking out of the lecture room and immediately seeing the coffee urns and cookies .. one thing simply leads to another.

another conference, day 1: first impressions.

so i'm currently in krakow, attending the ecm (european congress of mathematicians) and i must say, the meeting is big enough to .. confusing.

fool that i was, i registered just the day before the conference .. and are among the "unregistered" badge-less few. on the other hand, i'm not 300€ poorer yet .. (-:

on the plus side, though ..

• there's (decent) coffee everywhere and it's even served in cups and saucers.
• at the various book stands, i got a free issue of revista, as well as a free calendar.

(more thoughts to come ..)

conference, day 5: neither in nor out .. but still tired.

[from last night's draft]

there's something about having completed a ph.d. that irrevocably changes one's perspective.  for one thing, it tends to turn perfectly normal people into workaholics .. that is, if they weren't workaholics before;

even if they were, it still urges them to extremes.

so the trouble with conference participation is that it doesn't feel like work, though it does take an appropriate share of brainpower and energy.  even if confusion sets in early, it takes quite an effort to try and follow a talk, especially when it pertains to an area other than one's own interests. [1]

---

so this week has worn me out.  i think i avoided making a choice, really.  the options were either:

1. attend the conference as an unambiguous participant, or
2. leave it alone completely and work as usual.

in trying to do both, i achieved neither of them.  honestly, i felt distracted all the time:

when sitting in a talk,
i was thinking about my own research;

when at the office,
i thought about the conference.

i'm glad that i gave a talk on tuesday, though.  it seems to have sharpened my mind, and the questions and later discussions from audience members have stimulated some new ideas.  i think i see the core of my proof more easily now, and some results can in fact be sharpened and improved ..

.. which is a mixed blessing:  once these matters are settled, then it will make an unambiguously better paper; on the other hand, now there are more matters to settle and it will take more time to settle them .. and i was hoping earlier to finalise the preprint, right away. \-:

worthwhile things have no reason to be easy, i suppose .. but it would be nice to have something easy to do for a change.

---

at any rate, conference season isn't over yet, as next week is the european congress.  i don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just not react and get to LaTeXing.


[1] friends of mine have called mathematics a divisive subject: everything is either obvious or impossible, and often mathematicians react as such.  it probably makes us harder people to deal with than absolutely necessary.

conference, day 3: trapped by convenience.

[yes, this entry is out of order.  after a little thought, it doesn't seem that bad to post.]

sitting in the back of the lecture room, i quickly became lost in the gory details in the middle of a plenary talk (as usual).  so i started looking around.

it happens that the laptop screens of others are within my view.  this is hardly precise statistics, but it seems that most people are checking their email and writing replies .. with an occasional PDF open.

it seems like an honest enough reason to have a laptop open.  the life of academics is busy, among other duties, with getting back to colleagues, fellow committee members, or administrative staff at our home departments.

---

maybe technology has enthralled us, in both definitions of the word [1].

in theory, inventions like vacuum cleaners and automobiles and email have simplified the workings of modern life; on the other hand, not having maids or chauffeurs or secretaries at our beck and call, we are ourselves responsible for handling these matters instead.

it's not completely wrong to say that technology has created more work for us, not less.  modern life is conceptually more complicated, in that our schedules are fuller with the trappings of convenience.





[1] according to its entry in the free online dictionary,

en·thrall  (n-thrôl)

tr.v. en·thralled, en·thrall·ing, en·thralls

1. To hold spellbound; captivate: The magic show enthralled the audience.

2. To enslave.

conference, day 4: more bad behavior.

like anyone else, i have my fair share of bad habits .. just that, at conferences, they become more manifest.

take coffee consumption, for instance:

typically i drink 2-3 cups per day [1], but at conferences, there is always a morning coffee break and an afternoon one, too.  somehow conference participation culture is difficult to overcome:

as long as there is a break, then why not a coffee?

then there is the relaxation after a full day at a conference, often at a pub with many friends and colleagues.  the problem is that maybe just one more too easily translates to one-too-many, and often it's quite late at night when i finally find myself back in my room.

staying up late,
drinking alcohol to excess,
drinking coffee to excess .. and then having to wake up early!

none of these vices are really that serious, but they really wear me out if done too much in concert.  i feel it already with this week's conference; i can only imagine how again it can be, when i find myself next week in Krakow ..!



[1] for me, it's two cups in the morning, just after waking up, and one shortly after lunch, but not right afterwards. the effect of caffeine seems wasted if it is put in direct opposition to the sleepiness after a midday meal.

conference, day 2: words, words, words.

[written last night]

i complain a lot about having long, complete paragraphs on talk slides.  to explain, it was simply part of how i learned how to give talks:

though they don't perform arithmetic nearly as much as the general public believes, many mathematicians still find it easier to parse an equation than to read through a whole paragraph of sentences.

that's the whole point of mathematical notation: it's meant to be a powerful shorthand for quantitative ideas.

so if you can formulate something as an equation or inequality or formula, then usually it's just fine to write it that way, include some indication of what the hypotheses are, and then explain verbally what it means. [1] it's what i prefer, at any rate.

on the other hand, maybe i'm not being fair.  i happen to be a native english speaker, so my level of effort is minimal.  when talking at international conferences, people occasionally tell me that i should slow down my talking pace [2].

the fact is that for most people in the world, english is a less-than-perfect second language, and to speak well requires deliberate care for the right words to indicate the right meaning.

put another way, say that you're talking to an international audience:

in that case, why wouldn't you write up completely, readable english on your slides, in the event that the audience doesn't understand you (or rather, your accent) ..?

i don't have to like it, but i understand why it happens.



[1] if everything had to be on a slide, then what's the point of having a human speaker in the room?

[2] that actually happened earlier today: one guy in the audience asked me to go slower.  at the time i tried, but i don't think it worked out as he wanted.

conference, day 1: already, bad behavior.

[from yesterday's draft, on a scrap of paper]

i'm getting "worse" when it comes to behaving myself at conferences.  usually i pay attention for the whole of the first day -- an honest effort, if you will -- but it's already day one and by the second round of plenary talks, i'm not listening much anymore. [1]

instead, there's an odd thread that's run loose from my talk preparations, which are preliminary results and not yet submitted.

there's some leeway here in the hypotheses;
i wonder if i can prove something better?

so i spent most of the talks, scribbling.  every talk gets my undivided attention for ten minutes, you see; if it doesn't catch my interest after that, then i'm working on my own problems.

i'm not the only one "misbehaving" though:

during the last plenary talk of the morning, i heard the unmistakable sound of fingers typing on a laptop's keyboard .. and the keys are rather thin at that.

then again, it could be one of the forthcoming speakers, making last minute changes to make a more reasonable or accessible talk .. in which case, they would have my solemn appreciation.

speaking of which, i was subjected to a few painful talks today.  it's not the subject matter was particularly bad, but that the method or presentation was somewhat .. lacking.

in one contributed talk, there were screenshots of a PDF of the speaker's actual paper [2].  i suppose it could be worse: around 2-3 years ago, i attended a conference in which the speaker actually opened up a PDF copy of his paper, and scrolled up and down to get at the right theorems to talk about!

in another talk today, one slide consisted of a single paragraph that was twenty lines long of pure text.  (i counted, if only because of indignation.)

*sighs*

how anyone is supposed to follow those kinds of talks is beyond me ..!

to be fair, the first two plenary talks gave nice introductions to the Heιsenberg grοup, which was initially surprising but later made perfect sense. (i forget that there is a rich history of fοurier analysιs on this kind of Lie grοup, if only to show that it is a theory that isn't completely specialised to Euclidean spaces.)
.


[1] then again, the conference is centered around the topics of fοurier analysιs and pseudοdifferentιal οperatοrs .. neither of which i study.  it only happens that the conference is being held at my university and that it is easy to attend.

[2] the speaker was quite ambitious: in twenty minutes he even made it to section 7!