Smith College is a women's undergraduate college, founded in 1871 by a $400,000 gift from Sophia Smith. It started with 14 students, 14-acres, and 6 faculty. In practical terms, this means that the dorms do not have urinals.
I am told that the campus is scenic, yet beautiful, complete with Pond, River, Trees, and Japanese Garden. I would not know, having spent most of today in auditoriums either hearing or giving lectures. You will excuse me if these words come across somewhat weakly; my voice is still a bit hoarse.
The day starts way too fucking early, with the first meeting at 8:30 am. I have to stop being the last one to arrive at meals; I keep on ending up at the table with all of the foreign teachers and professors who don't speak the language very well. Sample dialogue:
"You study, what do you study?"
"Fractals."
"Fractils?"
"Fract-tals."
"Fric-tals?"
"FRAC-TALS."
"Ah, oh yes, fractals. What are these, these fractals?"
The 8:30 am meeting was for graduate students. There are twenty of us here, and it was good to see all of them put together so I could remember that everyone who wasn't there isn't a graduate student. For some reason, both professors and high school teachers look vaguely offended when mistaken for a grad student. Someone confused me with a professor yesterday, and I went around for at least an hour with a totally swelled head.
The graduate students are expected to fend for themselves, and they did. The conference coordinator came in for about five minutes at the beginning of the meeting, and basically just said "Organize thyself." And we did. By the end of the day, we had arranged a daily series of talks on our current research interests and had nicely printed schedules put into everyone's mailbox. I, like a fool, volunteered to give the first talk. Today.
The 10:30 talk was a good reminder that computer scientists, with rare exception, should not be allowed within a three mile radius of a classroom. After the speaker bungled through his slide on big-O notation, most of the audience was left with the impression that it was some form of a breakfast cerial used to analyze algorithms. The talk was on moving robots through a maze of planar obstacles, but none of the algorithms he presented would be capable of traversing over the conceptual obstacles required to get to an understanding of his topic. Such a task would be NP-hard, at least.
The 3:00 pm talk was an extended exercise in anti-Bourbaki geometric intuition cheerleading. It would have been better presented, me thinks, in the form of a Monty Python sketch:
[Two befuddled students stare at a blackboard.]
Student 1: "I even think I could solve this problem, if only I had some kind of geometric intuition..."
[A loud whip crack is heard as three elderly French mathematicians, the Bourbaki, run into the room.]
Head Bourbaki: "No one expects a geometric intuition! Our main weapon is fear, fear and terror. Our two main weapons are fear, terror, and a fanatical devotion to proofs. AMONG our weapondry are fear, terror, a fanatical devotion to proofs, and .. and .. there is no and. Cardinal Fang, read the axioms."
Cardinal Fang: "There is a straight line between every pair of points."
Head Bourbaki: "Yes?"
Cardinal Fang: "Unless, ah, unless there isn't a straight line between every pair of points, in which case you have a non-Euclidean geometry..."
[Students sneak out of the classroom.]
At 4:30 pm Frank Morgan gave his soap bubbles talks, which must be heard to be believed. From the moment he started blowing soap bubbles and announced "Mathematicians, including undergraduates, investigate soap bubbles" to showing the last overhead foil with a picture of himself, age 4, blowing soap bubbles with his mother, the audience was in the palm of his hand. It is not everday that you see a mathematics talk move the audience to tears, but he did it. The audience did laugh, the audience did cry, and it was, all things considered, better than CATS. The man is amazing. I remember once attending a talk on calculus reform where the presentor showed statistics on the sucess rates of various calculus reform projects (measured by increase in the # of math majors, etc.). One of the people in the audience noticed a sharp spike in the sucess rate of the calculus reform project at Williams College, where Frank Morgan teaches, and asked what cirruculum program they used there. The presentor tersely stated, "Williams College does not have a program. They have Frank Morgan."
Anyway, Frank Morgan is a large part of why I'm doing geometry this summer. Four years ago I was a hard-core algebra/number theory dude, or at least as much of a hard core algebra/number theory dude as a freshman could be. Then I attended a summer undergraduate research program at Williams College, had the good fortunate of landing into Frank's group, and I've been doing geometry ever since. I talked to him briefly at lunch before his talk, caught up with our current research interests, and then he proceeded to embarass me to death by continually citing the work I did with him a couple of years ago.
So Frank gave this amazing talk, and then I had to follow with the next talk after dinner, sort of the equivalent of an amateur comedian being slated to do stand up right after Steve Martin's act. It was my standard iterated function system fractals talk, concentrating mostly on the image compression and wavelet applications, because that's what the audience seemed to be interested in. Lots of questions about fractal tilings came up, as tilings are a big thing around here.
After the talk, we went out to Herrell's ice cream. I had a root beer/chocolate pudding cone, which experienced structural failure and had to be transplanted, _in vitro_, to a cup.