An afternoon at the Seminaire Bourbaki

bourbaki

The handout with the articles for yesterday’s three talks. It is very hard to find these unless you are actually at the seminar.

Saturday I attended the afternoon portion of the Seminaire Bourbaki at the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris. The Seminaire Bourbaki was started in 1948 by the Association des collaborateurs de Nicolas Bourbaki. The collaborative (who published many texts under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki) was founded by Henri Cartan, Claude Chevalley, Jean Coulomb, Jean Delsarte, Jean Dieudonné, Charles Ehresmann, René de Possel, Szolem Mandelbrojt, and André Weil in 1935. The seminars (which happen a few times a year) feature speakers talking about new developments in mathematics, and rarely do they speak about their own results or work. Rather, it is a chance for exposition on a current and “hot” topic. I was excited to be in Paris exactly when this was happening, so I decided to check it out.

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Sabatico Gigante: Texas-sized mathematics

This past year I have been on pre-tenure leave. As you may have seen in previous posts, I have been traveling quite a bit (like here, here, and here). Even though early on I knew I would be traveling a lot, I still needed a “home base”, a place to go back to after traveling. I could have easily stayed in Maine as some of my colleagues do on their sabbaticals. But I decided to go to Austin, Texas instead for the bulk of the year. In this post, I will explain a bit how I came to that decision and my experiences visiting the University of Texas at Austin‘s math department.

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Posted in networking, pre-tenure leave, research | 5 Comments

Accepting rejection

It seems peculiarly symmetric that just a week after my post on saying no to things to have more time to do research I would hear a “no” from a grant I applied to so that I can do research. Don’t worry about me, it was not a huge deal and I’m already over it (well, mostly). Also peculiar, and the reason for this post, is that all of this coincided with an article that came out last week by Michael J. Spires on the Chronicle of Higher Education about dealing with rejection from grants. I thought this was a sign from the math gods (Gauss? Euler?) that I should use this space to muse for a bit about the article and my own experience with rejection.

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Posted in dealing with rejection, grant proposals, research | 4 Comments