Alright. Can it be that I have not posted since September? I guess having a kid makes a time warp occur. I swear that was just a few weeks ago, not a whole semester ago.

Putting the log back in blog: I sold some coloring books at a local Thanksgiving weekend holiday fair. It was fun! Really enjoyed seeing other peoples’ art, too, and am fixing to buy some art for the house. Regionalist-type art. Minnesota. December 9 I’ll be at a local author fair, hanging out with the kinds of people who think about entertaining plots for murder. Wow. Gloria Dei church Gathering Room, 10 am-2 pm. Come check out the local stuff.

I presented last night for TCRUG (R users group) and it was fun and refreshing to learn from all the other presenters and attenders. I am trying to clean up my presentation just a bit so I can post it online (here? Github? Haven’t decided). Today had tons & tons of interesting talks, though, on configuration spaces and insurance (?! I learned about the Tweedie distribution) and brace algebras, and I had to finish writing up the homework for the class I teach. Sure, I had a full version of the homework in my phone’s notepad app, but that’s not enough to give to students.

The presentation was on tools for topological data analysis, but in some ways it was just a case study in doing math in R.

What else? Stuffed peppers with lamb are good. Six-month-olds have somewhat erratic sleep schedules. Having fun with watercolor paints — was seduced by Wet Paint’s holiday sale and got some new watercolors, and they are so much brighter than the ones from middle school.

Will share some fun math art tomorrow. This is truly just a rambly post because I’m challenging myself to write every day in December!

TL;DR: 30 math quote bookmarks with any coloring book order by 9/9/2017; lots of quotes and links to interesting interviews with/profiles of mathematicians below.

In my “quotes by modern or non-Greek/European mathematicians” post I asked if people knew of quotes about math that I could Instagram, basically. While there are few comments on that post I got some ideas via Facebook and email. Thanks in particular to Edray Goins for pointing me to several of these sites — Edray’s a number theorist at Purdue and the president of NAM and writes a blog on Dessin d’Enfants, which I want to give the coloring book treatment someday, and gave me a bunch more links which I’ll put below. Anyhow, here are some cool quotes I found:

Do not give up, for that is ignorance and not according to the rules of this art … Like the lover, you cannot hope to achieve success without infinite perseverance. — Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Fullani al-Kishnawi [ref Gwarzo, Hassan Ibrahim]

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A short post reflecting on what I actually did for two weeks at the Institute for Advanced Study this July.

Well, I went to the IAS to work with my collaborator Elizabeth Milićević, a professor at Haverford College. We’d started a project last May (2016) at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, and we had written an application to the Summer Collaborators program to get some dedicated time to work on the project. Why? We both have many non-research duties at our academic jobs; teaching and curriculum development take time to do well. I also had a baby in May, which apparently takes time whether you do it well or poorly 🙂 Dedicated time to work produces greater results than fragmented time, if you’re prepared to use it — and we were.

We kept a very civilized schedule for our two weeks: meet at 9 on weekdays and 11 on weekends, work until at least 5 but not later than 7, take a break for lunch before the physics workshop arrived in the lunchroom (who wants to stand in line behind 120 postdocs? not me!) and take a break at tea-time (3 pm at IAS). There was also usually a midmorning break and a 5 pm break if we worked late, because the aforementioned baby is still relying on me for breakfast, second breakfast, first through third lunches, etc. My husband came along as the primary care provider for our kid, and he’d often take a couple bottles with him and gain some freedom to go explore or do his own work, but as breastfeeding moms know, production doesn’t stop just ’cause baby’s gone exploring. On the plus side you can carry out computations while pumping. We never worked more than 6.5 days per week, and in fact my family visited several art museums while visiting IAS. Lots of geometrical art: Man Ray, Kandinsky, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Mondrian, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

Liz and I started our mathematical mornings with some caffeination and discussion of any examples or reading we’d done the night before. Although we’d usually have a direction already planned for the day, now and then that initial discussion would cause a slight turn. From the warm-up discussion we’d proceed to discussing a new idea and picking examples with which to test it, working through said examples, or working through someone else’s claims related to our desired results. That really is enough to take up eight hours of solid work. Before going “home” for the night we’d usually assess our results and decide what to do the next day. Since we were only together for two weeks, we didn’t pursue all angles to their full extent — we followed them up to a point where either we were sure they’d work and details could be worked out later or where we were stuck enough that it seemed better to switch to some lower-hanging fruit.

A working morning at IAS

Now we have two approaches to our problem that need to be synthesized but they’re both a little different than what already exists and very geometric, very beautiful. (Of course I’m biased — most moms think their kid is cute, right? and most mathematicians think their theorems are beautiful!) There are still those details to be filled in and some areas to finish planning, but it’s as if the outlines of the portrait have been painted and now we have to fill in the details of faces and fabric and also finish the background.

Moment graph a la Atiyah & Pressley

I was recently looking at some inspirational quotes people put up on Instagram or Pinterest — you know, some cursive writing about love or fate on a background of a beach. (I just joined Instagram so I’m trying to have fun with it.)

The Fields Institute is on Instagram and they do mathematician birthdays, putting up a quote by the mathematician and an image — that’s cool, too.

So I was thinking about mathematical quotes — maybe those would look nice and be inspirational (or funny). I looked up mathematics quotes and got all kinds of sites. On the one hand, excellent. On the other hand, one of the reasons I’m on Instagram is to be the change I want to see in the world and provide a more, mmm, 21st-century view of who does math and what math is. Euler is not that. So, where are the quotes from non-dead mathematicians? Mathematicians who weren’t European or Greek philosophers?

I appeal to you, the reader (and I’m asking other folks too!). Give me some quotes or places to find them. My first try: interviews with non-dead people, like Maria Chudnovsky.

Can you add more?