AMS Graduate Student Blog

The Learning Master has named the AMS Graduate Student Blog as one of the “Top 50 Blogs by Graduate Students.”

by Katz

I just saw this beautiful BBC documentary about Chaos, and I would highly recommend it. They attempt to reconcile patterns in nature, chaos, and possibilities for self-organization. It’s a really nice history of recent mathematical ideas including interviews with people like Ian Stewart. Of course, they could be a little more careful with their terms and it would be excellent, but it is accessible to a huge audience, and it is very well done. I don’t know how long it will be up on you-tube, so check it out soon.

Secret Life of Chaos

by Brie Finegold

DEADLINE for registering is February 5th

The symposium will be held on Saturday, February 20th at the University of Southern California, 3 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.  The symposium is free and parking and lunch will be provided, but registration is required.  See this website for  info on how to register and for last years schedule.

Here’s a quick run down:  Talks should be 20 minutes long, and graduate students are encouraged to give a talk even if they don’t yet have their own results. Susan Montgomery of the University of Southern California will provide a keynote address and participants will break out in small groups to discuss issues pertinent to women in math. There will also be plenty of opportunities to get to know each other.

by Tom Wright

In a previous post on this blog, I listed and discussed a number of things not to do during a job search, mostly from the experience of having done them and then later wishing I hadn’t. However, I left off one of the most important categories: things you shouldn’t do at the joint meetings. Having recently completed a Joint Meetings of indeterminate success, I figured that now would be a good time to rectify that omission. Continue reading ‘Joint Meetings: Hunting the Wild Job’ »

Robert Lang speaks about mathematical origami design

by Nicholas Neumann-Chun

Friday morning (the 15th) I was privileged to hear several talks on the mathematics of origami, including one by (my personal hero) Robert Lang.  Since early childhood I have been fascinated by origami, influenced primarily by my mother.  Only recently have I discovered that origami is a serious mathematical discipline!

The talks were about different areas of mathematical origami.  Lang talked very directly about how the art of origami is related to, and feeds off of, mathematics.  Traditionally, the two have had little overlap.  But starting in the mid-20th century, said Lang, there was a renaissance in the art of origami that made it possible for mathematicians to become involved.  Akira Yoshizawa took the ancient craft of origami and, among other things, introduced a standard folding notation.  This allowed artists to share and build upon their designs and ideas, and led to unprecedented advances in complexity and intricacy of origami models.

Continue reading ‘Mathematical Origami Design’ »

by Nicholas Neumann-Chun

Professor Bressoud talks about the MAA, mathematical careers, and teaching mathematics.

After a couple of talks this morning, one technical and incomprehensible, one unexpectedly mind-opening – more about this later – I got to sit down with MAA President David Bressoud.

Continue reading ‘Interview with MAA President David Bressoud’ »

Talks by Wilkinson, Harris, Stanley, Blum, Bhargava, Shor on Wednesday.

by Nicholas Neumann-Chun

I am now one full day of math lectures older.  The invited addresses are fairly accessible; that is, they’re aimed at a large audience (quite literally!).  That doesn’t mean I understood all, or even most, of what was said, but I was able to engage in bits of the six talks I saw throughout the day.  I’ll try to give a feeling for my immediate reactions to each of these talks.

Continue reading ‘JMM: Wednesday, January 13th’ »

by Nicholas Neumann-Chun

AMS President George Andrews supports a number of initiatives for the AMS, including a Fellows program.  Long-standing secretary of the MAA Martha Siegel characterizes the various mathematical societies.

Continue reading ‘Conversations with AMS President George Andrews and MAA Secretary Martha Siegel’ »

by Diana Davis

Perfect Rigor, by Masha Gessen.

Before reading this book, I had only vague ideas about Grigori Perelman. I thought that, after being a postdoc in the US, he disappeared back to Russia, lived with his mother for a number of years, then suddenly uploaded his proof of the Poincaré Conjecture to the arXiv and then disappeared back into silence. However, this is not true! The story, as you might expect, is far richer than that. Masha Gessen’s book explains it all.

This book traces Perelman’s life from the age of 10, when he joined a math club, through high school and math competitions, through the university, his postdoc positions and proof of the Soul Conjecture, through his celebrated proof of the Poincaré and up to the present. Whatever you may have thought about math education under the USSR, it is probably far from the fertile reality that Perelman experienced: one-on-one attention with teachers and graduate assistants who listened to every student’s solution to every problem, and taught students to verbally explain their solutions to their classmates. Gessen describes how Perelman (universally known as “Grisha”) was not the outspoken star of the class, but he could solve every problem, and never made a mistake, never producing a false solution. If Grisha said he had solved the problem, then he had done it correctly. Many years later, this caused his colleagues to take his arXiv papers much more seriously than they had taken the other supposed “proofs” of the Poincaré that others had published over the years: they knew that he never had any false solutions, so if Grisha said it was true, then it was not a matter of verifying the proof, just of understanding it.

Though Gessen was not able to interview Perelman, she interviewed just about every important person in his life, and paints a complete portrait of him and his mathematics. Though it is true that Perelman eventually stopped communicating with the media, immediately following his posting preprints on the arXiv he embarked on a month-long lecture tour in the United States, speaking daily on his proof and answering mathematicians’ questions for hours. Gessen explains how Perelman was initially eager to give the mathematical community this rare gift, his proof of the Poincaré Conjecture. However, she argues that he experienced repeated slights (such as the Fields Medal committee refraining from claiming that he had proved the conjecture, instead just praising his “contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow”) from the mathematical community. Over the years, this caused Perelman to retract himself first from mathematics, and then from the rest of the world.

At this point, Gessen uses a wonderful mathematical metaphor (p. 172):

The more Perelman talked about his disappointment with the mathematical establishment, and the more his acquaintances decorated his stories with demonizing details, the more Perelman’s sense of betrayal deepened. His world, which had begun narrowing in his first university year and then broadened slightly both times he had traveled to the United States, was now headed for its final, disastrous narrowing. Like a rubber band slipping inexorably off a sphere, his world was about to shrink to a point.

Continue reading ‘Book review: Perfect Rigor’ »

by Nicholas Neumann-Chun

The 2010 Joint Mathematics Meetings are coming up!  Next week the AMS (American Mathematical Society) and the MAA (Mathematical Association of America) will convene in San Francisco, CA.  From Wednesday, January 13 to Saturday, January 16, there will be nigh-constant paper presentations, colloquia, and addresses, as well as many social gatherings.  I want to attend as many of the talks as possible.  I hopefully will both write and read reports here.  I would also like to interview several of the speakers I see.  I will get more students involved with this blog; tell me if you’d be willing to help!  And last, but not least, I will present a poster in the undergraduate poster session.

It sounds like a busy week, and I’m looking forward to it – this is my first large math conference, so I’m naturally excited.

Who else is going?  What will you be up to?