Letter of Recommendation for a Boston Mathcation

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Beth Malmskog

Just got back from my month long research visit to the Boston area. I wrote last month about how hard it was to re-immerse myself in my research and writing for this visit, even though I desperately wanted to do just that. Well, I did manage to get back into my projects, and made some solid progress. I did a lot of computational work, worked with my group to get our SageMath code to the finish line (thanks so much, David Roe), and have big parts of a rough draft of a paper put together. I love the Letter of Recommendation column in the New York Times, which is about things which are under appreciated.  Honestly, I can’t say Boston is under appreciated in the math world, but I wouldn’t have expected some of the aspects that I loved the most.  So here are mini-letters of recommendation for some especially worthwhile parts my visit:

Having nothing to offer anyone. One of the best parts of this trip was the fact that, on a day-to-day level, I was really of little use to anyone at MIT. I don’t mean to say that nobody was interested in the math I was doing; it was more that I had no local knowledge or responsibility. I couldn’t answer questions for students, give directions to the cafeteria, or anything else. I had no meetings, my input was not required for any decisions. I love being helpful and involved in my department, but having nothing to offer to anyone was liberating. My time opened up miraculously.

My glare-y picture of a piece of this beautiful installation.

Hanging out with Sol LeWitt’s Bars of Color Within Squares.  This polished glass and epoxy terrazzo floor installation was commissioned by MIT and installed in 2007, the year that Sol LeWitt died.  I had seen several of LeWitt’s algorithmic or instruction-based pieces before, and those pieces always made me think of aspects of math and computer science–how a person who writes an algorithm is in relationship with people who actually carry it out, and watching a piece of art emerge from a complicated process or plan. The scale of his pieces are often part of the joy, too.  This floor is in an atrium open to the public, and I made many detours to stroll through, because just hanging out with the bright colors and being in direct contact with this giant piece of art made me feel good.

Talking face to face. Before I went to Boston, I wrote two carefully crafted emails to people there, explaining who I was, what I was working on, what I wanted to know, etc. These were pretty short emails but took me a long time to write, just because I didn’t know the people I was writing to very well and I was trying hard to be clear and undemanding. Nobody answered me, and I was struck by a sort of social and mathematical angst—should I write again, or did they not want to deal with me? When I got there, I pretty quickly saw both of these people in person and they were totally friendly. Through flukes of technology and email volume, neither of them knew I’d even written to them. So, the long and anxious process of writing those emails and ruminating on them came to nothing, not because people didn’t want to talk to me, but because that’s how email works sometimes. There are a lot of ways to miss your target from a long distance, and the stakes feel high when you are contacting someone you don’t know well. It saved the day that I was able to just show up and talk to these people in person.

Talking in person is just so efficient! In one of the cases I mentioned, I was looking for some mathematical clarification, advice on a project, and some ideas for possible journals. I had read a paper that this person was involved with, and had interpreted the results in one way, but after a short chat I was able to understand that the set up of their paper was slightly different than I had realized, and that our computational tools could actually solve a problem that they posed. He also was able to suggest several journals and tell me some concrete changes to make to the paper I was working on. I wouldn’t have been bold enough to send a draft (especially one in such an early stage), but in person I could just show him some parts of the paper and my computational data on my computer screen and we could talk about it easily. He didn’t have to spend the time writing an email back to me and making sure the tone was right, and I didn’t have to then dither about whether I should ask for clarification on various points. I could just ask, and a 20 minute in-person conversation was worth hours and hours of emails.

Bjorn Poonen answering questions after his talk, Number field fragments and Fermat’s last theorem

Great talks in the land of 10,000 seminars. I have mixed feelings about seminars.  I really like hearing about math, but I think that a lot of talks aren’t really designed to communicate as much as they are to impress.  So I had some ambivalence about going to a ton of seminars.  But as far as I can tell, there is an algebra or number theory seminar every day in Boston, and some days there are several, so I didn’t want to totally miss the chance to soak up some new and exciting math while I was there. And I did go to some great talks. Maybe my favorite was the Simons Collaboration Seminar that Bjorn Poonen gave during my visit. Bjorn, Andrew Sutherland, Jennifer Balakrishnan, John Voight, Noam Elkies, and Brendan Hassett have received a multi-institution grant from the Simons Foundation for Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation. There are a number of goals for this collaboration, and Bjorn gave a talk on one thread—an idea for a possible new proof of Fermat’s last theorem using objects called number field fragments. The math involved is hard. However, it is perhaps more manageable than the current proof. This talk just made me excited about math.  Bjorn is a really clear, excellent speaker, and, even though parts of it were beyond me, I both got a lot out of the talk and came away very impressed. It was such great fun to hear about new possibilities for a problem that has been central to mathematical culture for so long.

 

This is Maya, an awesome ambassador for Clover.

Everything at Clover. Of course mathematicians turn coffee into theorems, but we also occasionally need other fuel. This is where Clover comes in. This local chain started as a food truck and now has restaurants all over the city. They serve all vegetarian food, and most people I talked to agreed that their signature chickpea fritter sandwich is a true wonder. Except one person who thinks the breakfast popover sandwich is the real secret to their success. Anyway, I probably ate 10 meals at Clover while I was there and I loved every one. I also found my favorite Clover server, named Maya. Short story: One evening she was cleaning the juicer and had set it on the counter in an unusual place. The shift manager bumped it and it fell into a bucket on the floor. The manager didn’t see the juicer fall and was looking around confusedly for the source of the noise. Maya was trying to help me and play it cool and not laugh or call attention to the fallen juicer, and watching her juggle all this was utterly charming and hilarious and made my day. She deserves a letter of recommendation for just being awesome.

Girls’ Angle mentors Elise McCormack-Kuhman, a sophomore in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and Jacqueline Garrahan, a Masters student in Applied Math at Northeastern.

Visiting Girls’ Angle.  Girls’ Angle is a non-profit organization (I wrote about it a couple of years ago here) that headed by Ken Fan that, among other things, runs an amazing math club for girls in grades 5-12. Undergraduate and graduate students mentor the club members and help them investigate the mathematical world. The club meets on Thursday afternoons near MIT campus. I visited last week’s meeting, and was really impressed with the students and mentors. I dropped in on several working groups and saw at least two pre-high school students working on potentially unsolved problems of their own devising. I was asked not to describe the problems, so that professional mathematicians do not swoop in and finish them off before the girls are able to, a request I am very happy to honor. But I was just so impressed with the girls’ mathematical abilities and their understanding of how mathematics works—thinking of questions to ask, generating data, forming conjectures, and finally creating a rigorous proof. Also, it was great to talk to the mentors about their experiences with Girls’ Angle. Feeling a little down on the current numbers of women in mathematics? Visiting this club, meeting all these incredibly talented and interested girls and women doing math together, makes me hopeful that this can and will continue to change.

Sitting in on Mathematics of Social Choice. Another thing that I often feel down about is the difficulty of changing anything through legislation in a nation of gerrymandered state and federal congressional districts. Moon Duchin and the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group at Tufts University have taken on the mission of studying the applications of geometry and computing to US redistricting. Through a series of workshops across the country, they have taught a huge number of mathematicians and members of the general public about the mathematical aspects of redistricting, and mathematical techniques for addressing fairness and identifying unfair districting plans. I attended their Madison, WI workshop in October (which was awesome). I was especially interested to learn about a framework for identifying extremely gerrymandered districting plans that involves randomly sampling many possible plans, and using real voting data to determine what election outcomes would have been under these plans. A single plan can then be placed in context–does it give an outcome that falls within the big part of the bell curve of outcomes, or is it an outlier, giving results that are by comparison extremely beneficial to one party?  Moon was recently hired by the Governor of Pennsylvania to use this framework to analyze the districting plan proposed by the state legislature to replace the famous “Goofy kicking Donald Duck” plan that was declared unconstitutional by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court. Last week, I was lucky enough to be able to sit in on Moon’s Mathematics of Social Choice course at Tufts, on the day when she was teaching about this framework and process. I was totally excited about this, and I’m sure the students were too, but they probably didn’t know as well as I do how rare a classroom experience like this is. Maybe because we as math professors teach a lot of math that is far from our research, it is not all that common to hear a math professor talk in an undergraduate class about her own work. Add to that getting to hear a first-person account of her personal role in using this work to help create a more fair and just world. As if that wasn’t enough, by the way, this is happening RIGHT NOW, and it is also accessible to non-math majors.

Moon teaching Mathematics of Social Choice.

It was really energizing to see the possibilities of social change powered by mathematics, and to see how Moon shares this with her students. Not only is the topic very important to me, but it is also sort of career-affirming to see this synthesis of social engagement, mathematical innovation, and thoughtful pedagogy. I want to bring this all together, but I often feel that I’m not quite there, and I wonder if it’s actually possible. Apparently it can happen, and I am grateful that I got to see this in action in the classroom.

Now that I’m all energized, it’s time to get ready to go back to my own classroom.  Next up for me: rewriting my Calc 2 syllabus.  Thoughts about any of these activities, or what you would do with a month of math-cation?  Things I should plan for next time? Let me know in the comments.

Posted in networking, research, teaching, traveling, women in math | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Letter of Recommendation for a Boston Mathcation

Research (and Writer’s) Block

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Beth Malmskog

“Chord” by Anthony Gormley, in MIT Building 2.

In my imagined math life, my research and writing would never stall. I would do other things, but take some time to keep working on my favorite problems every day. I would think about math as I walked home sometimes, and get little ideas, and then work these out after dinner. I would take vacations, but somehow not forget anything while I was gone. In this world I also do yoga every day and never waste time on the internet.  I assume that some people actually live in this world, and I assume that they are super productive mathematicians and wonderful people. This is not my real world. In this world, I completely ignore my research for stretches of time and then need to start again. There are great parts to this world, too; I get totally immersed in other stuff that I enjoy, for example. The downside is that I constantly face the problem of restarting my research. And no matter why I stopped—whether because I got busy with something else or because I was totally stuck—starting again is really hard.

When I haven’t been working on a research problem for a while, it becomes a fearsome monster in my mind. I remember it as giant, surly, and toothy, and I become convinced that wrestling with it will only result in frustration and humiliating defeat. Often this is not true—I know that when I worked on it last, I made progress and maybe had lots of ideas for what to do next if only I’d had more time. When I was working on it last, I was immersed, excited, sure I would win. Now, though, I have forgotten everything. I don’t remember the definitions or the most basic results. Anything would be more pleasant than actually facing that vagueness and confusion. Writing a blog especially!

When I have finished doing some math but need to write it up, I have a different but similar problem. It seems that everything important is done, I understand it all, why do all the drudgery right now? It is nothing, it will take no time at all, so why don’t I just do this much more entertaining and interactive work? In fact, the writing is an enormous undertaking and usually the time when I find lots of mistakes and realize that I misunderstood something important. There are actually many small monsters lurking, perfectly capable of eating me alive, and in the back of my mind I know that my heart will drop in my chest over and over again as I discover these monsters in my “finished” work. Putting words on a page and, through this process realizing that I don’t really understand what I thought I did, is probably even less pleasant than picking up that pen to work on something that I know I don’t understand. Again, to be avoided–maybe I should work on that blog!

Well, I am now writing that blog, specifically so that I don’t have thinking about it as an excuse to avoid research and writing for the next few weeks. I just arrived in Cambridge MA for a four week research visit at MIT. As I’ve mentioned before, at Colorado College, where I teach, classes are organized into 3.5 week blocks (instead of semesters or quarters). This year, I will teach four out of eight blocks. During this time, I don’t think about research at all except for an hour a week during my SWARG* (and to be honest I don’t even make it to that every week). In my mind, the non-teaching blocks are spent mostly doing research. In reality, it is easy for several weeks to slip away just taking care of other important things that I didn’t do while I was teaching. These need to be done, but it is also much easier to complete these tasks than it is to finally pick up the math pen and just start working on my research. It’s also easier to have fun conversations with students who stop by my office, and so many other things. Hence the need for a research-cation away from the office.

So I am here, completely amazed by my good fortune, to get some research and writing done. My first impression of the MIT Math Department is of a sort of mathematical Disneyland, in the sense that mathematicians as famous in the math world as Mickey Mouse is in the larger world are everywhere, there is constant stimulation in the form of a huge array of seminars, and there is limitless free coffee instead of funnel cake. However, that analogy is frivolous, and all wrong in that it misses the essential fact that this wonderful place is also very serious, set up to make working on and talking about math as natural and effortless as possible. If I can’t get work done here, I’m done for. So I’d better do some math. Right after I write this blog, which is much easier than facing the unknown. But it’s time to get to the math now. Wish me luck.

PS Since this post has no special insight to offer about how to get past research and writer’s block, as a consolation, let me offer some pieces about writer’s block and starting something hard, which I read instead of starting to work on my research:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/smarter-living/micro-progress.html

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/14/blocked

https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/how-to-beat-writers-block

* Scholarly Writing and Research Group–something like Sara’s Writing Across the Curriculum group.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Research (and Writer’s) Block

Thank you for doing all the invisible work that makes math possible

Posted on February 28, 2018 by Beth Malmskog

Invisible made visible: my to-do lists from the last two weeks. Also, my favorite coffee cup, filled with coffee that someone else made. Thank you for the coffee!

I finished teaching Algebra two weeks ago today. Since then, I have worked my way through list after to-do list. I  helped plan and manage a public lecture, wrote a bunch of letters of recommendation, wrote some internal research grant applications for students, helped out with the student math clubs, met with a lot of students about various logistical things, bought tickets and made travel arrangements for a trip, did some committee stuff, answered random important emails, started coordinating a blah, blah, blah … this list goes on. It was all worth doing, and some of it was even pretty satisfying. But ugh, I am boring myself writing it, and you could be wondering why I mention all this less-than-glamorous stuff. I’m not special. This is my job. You all do all of this stuff, too! Or your version of this stuff. However, this work warrants mentioning because at times like this it takes up 80% of my work life. It’s the kind of work that nobody notices when it gets done, but without which so many things stop happening or never happen in the first place.

This work is invisible to most of the world as long as it happens, but is often deeply necessary to creating the kind of career I want and profession I want to be a part of. So I’m excited (? maybe not excited, but willing) to do it. The thing is, the pay-off is mostly abstract or part of the long game. The tasks I am thinking of are not all the same—some of these are service tasks, some research, some teaching, and many are just the grunt work of part of some big picture thing I am passionate about. The uniting factor is that these tasks are invisible. They aren’t tracked, and it’s nobody’s job to thank me for doing these things, or even to notice them. Of course, it makes my day when someone does.

Today the obvious occurred to me: probably everybody else feels the same way. In academia we get so much freedom to choose how we do our jobs, there are probably very few people who actually know all the things that we each do as part of our jobs. Even outside of academia, where roles are sometimes more clearly defined, most people do a thousand unnoticed tasks that make the workplace or the larger world better. We do these things because we love them, or we at least we believe they should be done. But most of the time, the majority of the tasks we do, the efforts we make in our careers and lives, are unseen or unremarked by the rest of the world. This is the way of life.

So, today I’m talking to you when I say: thank you for doing all this invisible work. Thank you for inviting that speaker. Thank you for writing that letter of recommendation at the last minute. Thank you for thinking hard about how to run that meeting. Thank you for refereeing that paper. Thank you for organizing that inconvenient travel, submitting the abstract, and getting on that early flight, so I could see you at a conference. Thank you for helping that student to find my office, or helping them with that question when I wasn’t around. Thank you for telling me again who to call in AV. Thank you for answering all those damn emails. Thank you for going to those talks that someone else organized. Thank you for having dinner with job candidates, and for reading all those job applications. Thank you for teaching a hard class. Thank you for asking that question. Thank you for filling the stapler. Thank you for all of the things that you do because you know that they need to be done, or that the world will be a very slightly nicer place if they are done. Thanks for kicking ass all the time. Thanks for smiling at me in the hallway. Thanks for making coffee. Thanks for reading those papers. Thanks for serving on that committee. Thanks for just coming to work every damn day.

You know what? I don’t notice these things enough. I will probably get busy doing my own invisible work and forget to notice tomorrow.  Today, though, I am immensely grateful for all of the big and small, unglamorous, invisible acts that make my job and the larger math world wonderful. Thank you for everything.

Posted in revising a paper, service, traveling, writing letters of recommendation | Comments Off on Thank you for doing all the invisible work that makes math possible