My Mathleticism

Last night we hosted a MadMen holiday party which was an absolute success. I'll be doing a post dedicated exclusively to pictures later this week, but just to get you in the mood, here's one lovely shot.



Ooooh, we look so angry.

So I'm gearing up for a pretty serious mathematical event next week (yeah, that's right, next week! When did that happen?). I'm headed to Chile to attend two important meetings. The first is a workshop on the arithmetic of quadratic forms (that's my particular research area...more on that later). This is going to be a smaller conference, maybe only 30 people, all of whom are serious players in the field. I'm not exactly sure how I fit it, but I've been invited, so off I go. This workshop lasts 3 days, and it's in beautiful Lake Ranco, Chile. After this workshop, we'll all head north to Pucon to go to the AMS-SOMACHI joint meeting. This will be a much bigger conference, with probably hundreds of attendees. At this conference that I'm going to be giving a talk: "Ternary Sums of Squares and Triangular Numbers"<--That's my original research(!)

So, clearly I've been a nervous wreck about this. How am I, me, yes me, going to stand in front of a room full of experts and talk about math! I'm going to sound so naive, and they're going to be wondering "who is this kid?" But then the craziest thing happened last week. I had a revelation. Usually giving a math talk is like trying to describe how a car works (Note: for those of you who actually know how a car works this analogy is not for you). You can kind of guess that there are some pistons firing and maybe some combustion is going on. Maybe you've opened the hood once or twice and taken a peek inside, but you haven't really gotten too deep inside the engine. It's always a little bit dodgy, because you don't really know what's going on in there. You can describe the more transparent processes, but if you try to say too much you eventually hit a wall. But this time, it's like I built the engine from the ground up. I've been in there, I had my hands on every single cog and bolt, and I turned that 7/8" slotted socket wrench with my own bare hands. This is my math. I built it.

So suddenly I realized that this is no big deal, not only am I fully capable of talking about this math in public, but damn, I deserve to profess it.