This box is connected to a Google Calendar, public, and maintained from my normal calendar program, in which I plan to announce travel dates for any major trips I make as they come up.

Note that currently stored in this calendar are:

• Ypsilanti, MI, November 13-24 2008
• Millersville University, Lancaster PA, December 10-19 2008
• Christmas, Stockholm, Sweden, December 19 2008-January 4 2009
• AMS MAA Joint Mathematics Meeting, Washington DC, January 4-9 2009
• DARPA Topological Data Analysis, Santa Barbara CA, January 21-23 2009
• AMS Southeastern Regional Meeting, Raleigh NC, April 4-5 2009
• Operads thematic school, Luminy, France, April 20-25 2009
• Operads international conference, Luminy, France, April 27-30 2009
• ACM SOCG, Aarhus, Denmark, June 8-10 2009
• De Brún Workshop on Applied Topology, Galway, Ireland, June 29-July 10 2009

I am, as always, happy to add to my travel plans. I like traveling. If you want me around, poke me in a comment here or email me at mik (at) math (dot) stanford (dot) edu.

I’ll be doing a “US tour” in March / April. For the people who might be interested – here are my whereabouts, and my speaking engagements.

I’m booked at several different seminars to do the following:

Title: On the computation of A-infinity algebras and Ext-algebras
Abstract:

For a ring R, the Ext algebra carries rich information about the ring and its module category. The algebra is a finitely presented k-algebra for most nice enough rings. Computation of this ring is done by constructing a projective resolution P of k and either constructing the complex or equivalently constructing the complex . By diligent choice of computational route, the computation can be framed as essentially computing the homology of the differential graded algebra .

Being the homology of a dg-algebra, has an induced A-infinity structure. This structure, has been shown by Keller and by Lu-Palmieri-Wu-Zhang, can be used to reconstruct R from
.

In this talk, we shall discuss the computation of and methods for computing an A-infinity structure on the Ext algebra. Examples will be drawn from group cohomology, where the computation of the Ext algebra has conditions from Benson and Carlson for recognizing whether a partial computation has the entire structure.

Talk dates are:
March:
19 – Stockholm University
26 – UPenn
27 – Millersville
29/30 – Graduate Student Topology Conference, UIUC
April:
8 – Stanford
11 – U Washington, Seattle
May:
8 – NUI Galway

I will be in Millersville, with occasional visits to UPenn during March 25-28 and April 10-20. I’ll be somewhere in Illinois most of March 28, and at UIUC for the GSTC 29-30. I’ll be at MSRI March 31-April 4, and then at Stanford April 4-10.

I bought one book – Adams’ Knot book, with free shipping, for $22.

And I drooled over one more – Kozlov’s Combinatorial Algebraic Topology. The hardcover was down from $99 to $70 at the congress stand, but still was WAY outside my own budget capabilities.

Now, this book does algebraic topology on simplicial complexes. It does everything I’ve wanted a reference for with simplicial complexes. And at some point, I’ll REALLY need to get it.

I listened to a bunch of talks on Mathematics and Arts – including one on knitting hyperbolic pant crotches for toddlers – and one on an analysis of a combinatorial game on graphs: “Flee from the Zombies” – very entertaining.

I also spent an hour talking about the historical background of -algebras and bialgebras with one of Ron Umble’s students.

Once all talks I wanted to hear were done, I went off to San Diego old town, visited a yarn shop, and bought a skein of a deep navy blue wool yarn and a pair of bamboo knitting needles. I’ve started a project where I intend to knit myself a scarf with garter knit in alternating directions. At each row of prime index, I change the direction of the garter knit. We’ll see how it turns out.

Tomorrow, I’ll just be touristing; and possibly doing some thesis- or application-work while I’m at it. I’d go see Balboa Park, the Museum of Unnatural History, and possibly go down and look across the border on Mexico. After all, it’s less than 20min by trolley from my hotel to Mexico…

So instead, I learned beading. I did two prototype versions of small and neat little Borromean rings in golden seed beads and blue, shimmering bugle beads. The SF fan / knitter / crafter who taught me was busy doing earrings in the shape of torus knots. Gorgeous. She has a plan for doing triple torus knots (solid spirals with bugle – seed – bugle – seed – bugle – seed) interlinked like Borromean rings.

I held my own talk just after two talks on using computer-assisted proof techniques for game theoretical analyses. The guy talking argued for beautiful programs being more important than beautiful proof, which gave me a great hook-in for my own talk.

And at least one guy was seriously interested in Haskell, partially due to my own talk.

I also met one of Ron Umble’s students. Gonna sit down with him tomorrow and talk computation of A-infinity with him.

I had a plan for meeting bit-player, and maybe, maybe virtualcourtney, in the evening. However, bit-player had to be present for the premier showing of a new documentary about the US IMO team. So I went there too, watched the movie, btu couldn’t find bit-player.

So I drifted in the general area, and got pulled into a town meeting for the youngmath.com network. They were collecting issues young mathematicians need adressed, and ended up pushing me for issues as well.

After all this, I was set to go home and crash in bed.

However, as I stood, waiting for a red light to switch, someone next to me ask me “Are you a mathematician?” and then promptly invited me for dinner. Irish pub. Guinness. Talisker. And really good Guinness beef stew rolled in a pancake. And a marvelous chat. The two guys that invited me out are running a tenure-track job search, and had a LOT of really cool things to talk about. And they digged a lot of my various thought, and came with marvelous feedback on my CV and how to read the reactions I’ve had on my application material so far.

All in all, the day has been a blast.

And yet, I had trouble finding anything in the talks I wanted to hear.

i woke up, went down to the employment schedule, and fetched my interview schedule. Then I went to Frank’s pancake house and ate their World Famous Apple Pancake. The thing was 20cm high, covered a full plate and incredibly delicious. It also cost more than I expected to spend on breakfasts, but splurging once is alright.

Then I walked around, doing nothing much, and checked out the universities I was assigned to interview with on the web. Small. Teaching oriented. And in small towns. Both of them.

First interview went well enough, though I doubt I’ll want to go there and I doubt they’ll want me either. I’m not convinced that a university whose main claim to desirability is their pre-veterinary and equestrian programs will agree with my severe horse allergy.

The second went even better. They were seriously enthusiastic about me, insisted I send in a real application (they don’t accept email – they require paper applications), and were hinting about wanting me to settle down with a tenure track position. They also made a big deal about handling mathematics-linguistics dual career couples well.

These interviews made me realize one thing I’ve done wrong. My cover letters. I sent them out reading basically

Dear $COMMITTEE.

I would like to submit my application for $POSITION.

I believe I would be a good fit since my own research is tangential to your departmental research, especially considering the areas @AREA.

I have a 2-body problem, and you would be solving it.

I look forward to teaching.

with variations as appropriate.

What I should have written would be more along the lines of

Dear $COMMITTEE.

I would like to submit my application for $POSITION.

I believe I would be a good fit since my own research is tangential to your departmental research, especially considering the areas @AREA.

I have a 2-body problem, and you would be solving it.

I look forward to teaching.

Oh, and also, I have a kick-ass idea I’ve been working with for several years, and that you should copy, with me at the helm. We take a bunch of high schoolers, and we do undergraduate research programs with them. Then, if we get insane amounts of NSF funding, we’ll send them off to the Junior Mathematical Congresses that the Europeans keep on doing, or just organize one of those ourselves.

Furthermore, I believe it to be my sacred duty to spread my passion about mathematics to the next generation.

Lunch was had with Rudbeckia Hirta at a really neat mexican restaurant. Lunch was good. Meeting Becky was kinda like a fanboi interview session – she’d seen me in her comments section, but she doesn’t trawl the blogosphere like some of us do, and hadn’t read anything of mine. So many of my questions had natural answers along the lines of “Well, you blogged this” and there was a clear imbalance in familiarity between us.

My talk went OK. Afterwards, I chatted a bit with a couple of guys loosely associated to the UPenn A-infinity workgroup, who know Ron Umble well. Great fun.

Dinner was had with Mary Williams, a Phoenix based SF-fandom knitter mathematician (why do those seem to reinforce each other?), who convinced me to come along to the knitting circle, and whom I bestowed waaaay to many good design ideas. Putting us together started some sort of catalysis that probably wasn’t healthy.

We watched a talk about using sonofication and music as a teaching tool. And then went to the knitting circle.

I learned to knit again, and started on a small projectlet embedding the Pascal Triangle Sierpinski model in knitting by just flipping the stitches. I didn’t have time to make it appear clearly, but it was fun.

I returned from the knitting circle completely exhausted at just before midnight. Goodnight.

I’ll be there, and so will bit-player. Join in you too!

I’m completely exhausted.

And I just got through the first day.

However, I also managed to meet up with S from the university interested in me. We had a really nice chat, and I feel rather good about it.

Other things done today – listened to an interesting talk generalizing Koszul algebras based on the highest degree ring generator of the Ext algebra. Listened to bits and pieces of a talk on Koszul and Verdier duality. Saw Flatland – The Movie (with Martin Sheen playing the main character, Arthur Square).

I also chatted with Cliff Stoll – whose sales pitch for the Klein Bottles is immensely entertaining; NSA – who don’t want me; Maplesoft – who are interested in me; Mathematica – who pointed me to their website; various e-Learning companies; and many many other exhibitors.

Also, got tired, hungry and WET. It’s bloody raining here.

I get out of bed at 3.30am, CET, not having been able to sleep particularly well at all. At 4am, I drag myself out to the taxi; which charges more to get me to the airport shuttle than the airport shuttle itself does to get me out to the airport. I don’t care that much – I need the coddling at that ungodly hour.

Checking in and going down to Frankfurt is uneventful. Every single passenger is transferring to either Eritrea or the US, and all but two have managed to check their luggage through as well. n
The remaining two – me and one more poor bastard – have our luggage rerouted to another conveyor belt. And no information about it. When, after an hour, the “Stockholm pending” turns into “Stockholm finished”, I go to lost baggage, where they scan my slip and direct me to the right conveyor belt. Where the bag happily reposes.

One hour lost.

As I get up to the United checkin desks, I’m met by a slightly harried guy who asks me where I’m going, and then says that the flight has been cancelled. I get to stand in another line to get this taken care of.

Half an hour later, I am rebooked. Instead of United Airlines FRA – SFO, SFO – SAN, I fly Indian Air FRA – LAX, and then United LAX – SAN.

I check in, eat lunch and go through security without anything remarkable happening. The relevant corner of Frankfurt Flughafen rates among the most boring I have ever seen.

And then the flight arrives. Empties. And sits there.

An hour late, we get to board. And sit around waiting for another undefinable while. And then, at last, we take off.

Inflight entertainment is geared to the indian market, and distributed with individual headphones and roof-mounted TV-screens. I have seen a bunch of weird stuff, including stalkerish bollywoodial music videos and an amazing movie featuring the Panjabi rebellious girl with the traditionalist parents, who recruits a depressed stonerich kid with an inherited industrial empire as her aide in getting her big love. The movie ends happily, and predictably, but has an astounding amount of entertaining whackiness on the way there. I only wish I knew what it’s called. The female lead character is called Geet at any rate…

About thrice bored-out-of-my-head later we arrive in Los Angeles. Late. I get out of the plane, through immigration (uneventful), get my luggage (another hour lost) and through customs. Heaps of kudos to the marvelously nice border police who rerouted an entire line with me at its head to the unused and undetected open customs checkers. Generosity and friendliness that warms the cockles of my heart as well as the sub-cockle-area.

Then the farce begins. I get out of the terminal to the transit desks. “Yeah, that departs too soon for us. You need to go to the terminal. Outside and then right.”

I run like mad to terminal 7. Halfway there, I keel over from asthma, sleep deprivation and malnutrition. I arrive and am adviced to stand in the hedged-in line of hopeless cases. Which is being served by “Our two competent agents who are doing their best” – sorry, the empty desk.

And I stand there for an hour. I arrive in the hall in time to get on the (heavily delayed) flight I was supposed to go on. But nobody wants to take care of getting me the boarding card. I only get to speak to an agent five minutes after that flight left.

She puts me on standby for the 10.30pm to San Diego. Which would have me arrive in San Diego after over 29h of constant (and awake) travel. IF I make the flight at all, that is. I try to talk backup plans and other options, citing over and over again that United put me on Indian Air in the first place and that I need to be in San Diego by tomorrow – having both informal faculty interviews and workshops planned for that day. AND that I need to get to my hotel before they void my reservation.

She just shrugs. And gives me the phone number to the closed customer service hotlines.

I go through security on the verge of hysteria from malnutrition, sleep deprivation and a mounting panic. A TSA agent asks me what’s up, and then tells me that I need to hold United to their obligations. Kudos to law enforcement in general on this trip – they have been the source of uplifting supportive comments and actions this trip.

I get through security without any problem. Dive into McDonalds. And take care of the malnutrition part. With a filled stomach, my mind works better and less panicky.

At the gate, they nod sympathetically and then give me a boarding pass. I’m IN!

And shortly after that they tell me that 10.30pm got turned into 12.15am since the machine needs to go to Santa Barbara and back before we can ride it.

Here’s hoping that 500 West has all-night checkin. And that restful evening loading my batteries for the congress week kinda evaporated. Meh.

Also, I’ll be speaking twice. Come listen – if you dare.