Annual American Math Society meeting is held at San Diego. So it seems not only bad things strike when I am here (such as the fire). Good things still happen :).
A very nice professor of mine, Justin Roberts from last quarter arranged another professor to pick me up from where I live which is very far from downtown to give me a lift to the convention center. (I feel bad I let such a great professor and a potential good friend down last quarter by taking 5 courses last quarter and not being able to perform my best after 3 hours of travailing over some other test. )
The only thing I found understandable is that I didn't understand anything. Well, it's reasonable because I haven't got to the level of knowing what their keyword meant. But that's OK. Time will take care of that.
I had lunch with them and who said math people are not fun. They make the same jokes everybody else does except someones with math stuff that I didn't understand. A post-doc felt sympathetic about confused Paul. So she talked to me more which was very nice. I asked for her email and she told me to google her... I haven't really deciphered that.
Another discovery is that math society is just like any other society, again. People are attracted to celebrities. We went to hear Terence Tao speak whose fame is equivalent to a guy like this, "finishing PhD at 22 and winning Nobel prize before 30". Many of them gave a praise about his speech but I thought it was not bad but not that good either. I gave it "normal". But with a 1 hour plenary talk, that's as much and as little he can / should do.
Met this Russian scholar Sasha Voronov. Chinese scientists have an unexplicable respect for Russians because above all, we learned most from them. And we were still using almost Russian textbooks in PKU my first year. And if Americans think we are any unhumane at education, I suspect it's learned from Russia. And I don't think it's not necessarily bad to be strict with education. And in fact, UCSD, the school I'm currently on exchange at, is has a quite heavy work-load for undergraduates.
Oh, last but definitely not the least, there are SOOOOOOO many mathematicians. So many. I remember when I was young, I was very supprised how many people take the math competition. This is reminds me of that, for no obvious reason.
OK, done with babbling today.
3 comments:
"google her" means to go to google and type her name into the search. "Google" has now become a noun and a verb in English. :)
Yeah, I knew what literally google meant. Sorry, I didn't explain the question clearly Allison and thank you for being my loyal reader.
OK, my question is, if you ask someone for contact and they ask you to google them. Does that mean they're reluctant to let you know of their contact etc?
She may just want you to visit her webpage or blog, hehe.
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