nawl

Reporting live from the Joint Meetings...

There are two parallel threads going on in my head as I write this.

The first: conferences are awesome. There are about 5,000 mathematicians here. That's a lot. I know a surprising number of them. Of course all the ETSU kids are here (except Ian, who has decided he hates math and is going to law school), and people I know because of Kevin, but less expectedly I keep running into people from Berkeley classes, from bab5, from ballroom dancing. Random people come up to me and start talking, asking if I'm a grad student at Berkeley and if so, do I know so-and-so. I feel almost ashamed to admit that I am neither a grad student nor a mathematician. I met a super-friendly analysis guy from Texas, chatted about programming with a recently-graduated double major in computer science and mechanical engineering, talked about Debian and Berkeley with a random Russian guy from Penn State, and so on. And then there's the famous people. Oh, that's Ron Graham talking on his phone, and Benoit Mandelbrot that I just bumped, and Erik Demaine surrounded by a big crowd of admirers.

And the math... for the most part, I've been sticking to the invited talks, since most of them are aimed at a "general math audience" (read: accessible to me), and long enough to provide an actual discussion of a topic. It's enough to make me wish I was a real mathematician. My favorite so far was Ravi Vakil's "Given four lines in space, how many other lines meet all four? The geometry, topology, and combinatorics of the Grassmannian." And here I thought all this algebraic geometry stuff was boring. He's obviously excessively brilliant in that way that probably makes him super-friendly in real life, and instills in him a deep desire to share beautiful ideas with the rest of the world. (And write books about my excessively brilliant friends he's shared beautiful ideas with.) He started with, well, the question in the title, and gave two intuitive arguments supporting his answer of two ("One of the few problems in linear algebra where the answer is not 0, 1, or infinity."), one using linear transformations to map the arbitrary lines to lines on a hyperboloid (complete with a spiffy demonstration made out of circular velcro pads attached by strings that he then rotated to show us exactly how the lines could cross), and the second using "virtual reality" where he swooshed lines across the page and across the stage, and told us to stand on intersections and pointed into the sky to show the lines. Then he expanded things and started talking about ideals and symmetry and using the structure of the solution to solve much larger problems. Everything was simple, beautiful, obvious once it was explained, tied together multiple areas of math, and followed naturally by asking the right questions at the right time. I was in love. I should have taken notes.

Tangent-wise, he mentioned Henry Segerman's web page, and I was reminded of this, and more tangentially of Kevin's pipe-cleaner Klein bottle and projective planes, and his description of an origami ball he once made for someone that you could hit to cause it to break into many pieces. Beautiful things, just because. Would that I were a mathematician.

That's part one.

The second: being at a conference like this emphasizes the difference between the conference attendees and those who are serving them. When I registered, the woman printing my name tag asked about the weather outside, and she told me she had been laid off from her job and was doing this in-between, and that she liked it because she was a "people person". The conference photographer took some pictures of me looking, coincidentally, at pictures of Bathsheba Grossman's sculptures, and struck up a conversation about how I didn't look like a mathematician, and how strange it was to be in a conference like this. The cashier at Walgreens had two-inch nails on her ring and pinky fingers, and when I commented on them, she told us that her others had been that long, but broke off when she reached to grab something off the wall at the store.

The conference is being held at both the Hyatt and Marriott in downtown Atlanta. The buildings are incredible. This is what you see if you look up in the Marriott. Those are glass elevators. There are curved pathways over empty space leading to the elevator area. It all seems rather appropriate for a math conference.

So is the price. I'm staying at the Atlanta Hostel, a run-down old building advertising itself as a bed-and-breakfast about a mile away. It's homey, almost. The first night, someone's snoring was keeping me awake, so I padded downstairs and found two French guys, a random guy from Winnipeg, and algebraic geometer from Washington, and a Spanish teacher from the Virgin Islands playing pool. The next night I bought ear plugs.

At night, the streets are almost deserted, except for stray mathematicians (who are almost uniformly pale-colored), and homeless people (who are, as far as I've seen, uniformly black). This morning I took a new route to the conference and passed what must have been a shelter or soup kitchen attached to a church. There must have been a hundred people in line outside. They were all black men. A bit further on, I watched a guy in a wheelchair drive down the lane into oncoming traffic because the sidewalk ended.

I'll end this with a gratuitous picture of buildings disappearing into fog in Toronto.