Proving theorems

Happy New Year

2009-08-31T16:27:00.005+01:00

You may wonder what kind of weirdo calendar I'm following. Or, indeed, what I did with myself for several months.
The answer to the first question is that I always feel September first as the beginning of a new year. A vaste expanse of months, and weeks, and days, and minutes, in which I can try and experiment with something new, something better. This year I'm particularly energetic due to extremely long vacations (I will not tell you how long, lest you commit the sin of Envy).
The answer to the second is that I had very long vacations, and got to spend a lot of time with my children. This has led me to seriously reconsider my work strategy. I am now planning to reorganize so as to become more efficient and have more time for my kids. And for my husband. And for my students.
And, first and foremost, for myself. Happy New Year, everybody!

Interesting days

2009-02-03T18:47:00.004+01:00

I spent the best part of the weekend with five children (mine plus two 7-year-old classmates of the twins) and no grownup, since my husband is away for work reasons.
I managed to keep my sanity when at 8.30 am on Sunday morning I noticed that the heating wasn't working, and I had no clue how to fix it and no way to contact my husband (who regularly does so, it's a recurrent and trivial issue).
Luckily it started snowing (it never, ever snows!) so all the kids went out to play and I could search for the instructions: when they came back the heating was working.

It was actually wonderful: the boys played, sometimes together and sometimes separatedly, and I had time for a series of long chats with my daughter. She even admitted something I had suspected for a long time, namely that a "friend" of hers tells her she's fat. Now that this is out in the open, I can at least fight back.

Starting to work again and dealing with minor healthcare issues was also not very pleasant. I spent most of the last two days gulping painkillers, and most of today at a meeting - sorry, at two back-to-back meetings. I seem to be much better than I used to at being smiling and polite to people I consider royal a****les.

I even managed to sneak away for ten minutes for a glass of milk - and a discussion with my most brilliant student about how to prove a certain theorem she needs. She gave me the best clue (i.e., reference to a theorem by another genius student of mine) but then it was my turn to put the pieces together. My most brilliant student and I have had tons of communication problems, the main reason being that she's vastly smarter and faster than I (and of most others as well) and originaly didn't understand the purpose of slowing down and other social nicities like using different letters for different objects in a proof. Now we have adapted to each other and it's actually a joy talking to her. Unfortunately, our time together is almost over.

But most of all, I liked this. Sigh. I wish I could have voted for Obama, too. Especially compared with what we have to put up with in my country.

January madness

2009-01-14T16:20:00.002+01:00

I spent most of the Christmas vacation visiting family members (actually my husband's family). It was pleasant and relaxing, and would have been perfect hadn't I gotten a really nasty sore throat on Christmas day. After some attempts to find a doctor who would be willing to make house calls, I found some antibiotics at home and just took them for a week. I'm happy to say that I'm feeling well and the rest of the family enjoyed perfect health.

Now the situation is as follows:
1) a long boring job I had planned to do during the vacation is still to do;
2) I'm teaching 8 hours/week, on two advanced courses that require a lot of preparation;
3) there are a number of funding deadlines in the very near future;
4) there are overdue papers to write;
5) there are submitted papers to rewrite;
6) there are a million of recommendation letters to write;
7) my daughter is getting dental braces soon;
8) my husband has communication issues with a student and needs (and gets) help;
9) I still have to plan a scientific trip which involves getting a visa.

On top of this, we are having the most appallingly bad (cold/windy) winter in 10+years..

I just want to curl up somewhere and sleep until spring comes.

Mothers' choices

2009-01-09T11:12:00.004+01:00

A lot has been said about the decision by Rachida Dati (french minister for justice) to go back to work five days after giving birth to her newborn. Most of what has been said was negative: concern over mother's and baby's wellbeing and bonding, lack (or reduction) of breastfeeding, and fear of backlash on all mothers who choose a more usual timetable.

Let me start by saying that my country has a compulsory maternity leave of several months - i.e., you can't go back to work, even if you want to, and you get full (or next to full) pay. I think this is a sound policy, but this is not what I want to discuss now.

A minister is not just "a woman doing a job". She is a person who has chosen a very special, very demanding career; like all such people, she chose it with her eyes open, and took into account that this might lead to some disruption in her family life - if she ever had a family. Nobody beats an eyelash if a politician moves to a different town and sees their children only occasionally, even for years.
Rachida Dati has chosen to go back to work, knowing that she is missing something; at the same time, she knows that her baby will be well taken care of (France has a solid culture of nannies, and I imagine that a minister can choose the best). If she chose not to breastfeed, or to supplement with formula, again it's her choice; it has some drawbacks, but most kids thrive just as well on formula.

And I don't understand the anger about her looking well; some women stay overweight after pregnancy, but not all do. I expect she chose to wear some kind of corset; it's not unhealthy, at most uncomfortable (and some women having had a c-section tell me it can actually help). Her shoes look indeed very uncomfortable, and possibly unhealthy, but in our culture nobody criticizes women for their stiletto heels.

Summing up, she's a woman whose choices are very different from mine, but they are imho reasonable and consistent choices, worthy of mine and everybody else's respect. I would like to live in a world were such either/or choices wouldn't be necessary, but pending a revolution, I'd rather blame the patriarchy than the women who have to deal with it. And Dati has shown ample ability to beat the odds against her.

Long Weekend

2008-11-17T18:49:00.004+01:00

I spent the weekend in another town, visiting an old friend who has a daughter the same age as Hamster; I'll call her Mulan because she's smart, full of energy, and (despite her prettiness) her behaviour doesn't quite fit feminine stereotypes. Also like Mulan, she's a beloved only daughter.
Mulan's dad and I had been a bit worried preparing this vist; both girls are a bit shy, and their common language (and Mulan's native) is one that Hamster is not quite fluent in. The food and accomodation planned were also very different to what Hamster is used to.
But the girls positively surprised us. Hamster ate all the new food, and just didn't ask for seconds of things she didn't like; she let Mulan braid her hair, and they bathed together without a problem. Mulan let Hamster use her bed, and slept on a foldout on the floor; she didn't complain ever about Hamster's hesitant speech and funny accent, and willingly repeated at a slower pace many of her own sentences.
There were some difficult moments, usually related to a lack of food, or drink, or both, but they didn't last long. And I'm proud to have been with Hamster as she saw her first mummy and her first blue whale skeleton. We're now trying to plan a visit from the Mulan family to our town.
I think we need to be more courageous in traveling with the kids. Apparently the twins also behaved very well during the men-only weekend.

Yesterday evening

2008-11-12T13:48:00.003+01:00

I picked up Hamster at home, picked up her friend Celtic and Celtic's mother, and proceeded for pizza dinner plus movie. The movie was Mamma Mia!, and ours where the only children in the cinema (at the 8.15pm show). They enjoyed it a lot, although not as much as we mothers did - we got a few more jokes, or so I fervently hope.
Hamster claims she can understand part of the lyrics in the original without reading the subtitles.
I have now ordered the dvd together with a copy of Priscilla, the Queen of the Desert. I will need to discuss with PrinceC whether the latter should also be shown to the children, or at least to Hamster.
Celtic is so named because when she started going to Hamster's daycare center she was described by one of the cafeteria cooks as "she looks like a celtic princess". Celtic is very tall for her age, has a fair complexion, green eyes and wavy blond-red hair. She also wears glasses.

Blog Technique - Family Names

2008-11-12T13:38:00.004+01:00

I've decided that I need names for people in the blog, and that the system of numbering people, while mathematically sound, is confusing me (especially as the students are heading into the double-digits).
Hence, C#1 will be henceforth called Hamster: this was her nickname when she was a baby, because of how round her face was. My husband will be PrinceC (for Prince Charming, which is how he looked like when we met - no similarity with any Wildean character is implied, although he does age well).
I'm still working on nicknames for the twins: I'm tempted by Shout for C#2 and Whine for C#3 but am afraid that it might sound negative :-).

Back to everyday life

2008-11-10T16:50:00.003+01:00

This week is the first normal week. All students are there, everybody has reached (I hope) their final office, and I have no official travel scheduled for the next few months.

On the other hand, my private life is full to the brim. Tonight, dinner at S#9's with my whole family (he actually likes kids) and his mother - who's a math professor herself. Tomorrow, to the movies with C#1, a friend and the friend mother. We will see Mamma Mia! Next weekend, London tour with C#1. Next week, I'll be part of a theatre show, reciting part of the declaration of the rights of women. This last event is particularly pleasant, since it's a direct effect of female lobbying, namely having dinner with most of my female colleagues (unfortunately, though more than half were present, we didn't need a particularly large table).

Now I just have to finish two overdue projects, but I find it incredibly hard since all I want to do is work on my New Pet Project. I have even chosen what journal to send the paper to :-).

Oh, and there are no comments at all about the Obama election because I tend to talk when I'm grumpy.

Like in the old days

2008-11-02T22:36:00.003+01:00

I feel young again. Today I took a long (9+ hours) train trip, since taking the airplane woudn't have been so much faster. To complete the deja-vu feeling, the second train was 35 minutes late. So I missed the third, and ended up spending one hour chatting with a friend of my college years in front of the station, under an unseasonably blue sky.
The unfortunate side effect is that I'm completely exhausted.

To justify the label mathwork, I'll add that:
1) I did work during most of the journey;
2) purpose of said journey is participation in a scientific conference.

I hope that on my way back the three-train system will work somewhat better - or this time I'll end up speding the night at my friend's place.

Big changes

2008-11-01T14:59:00.003+01:00

Actually, big changes are usually evident to the outside world: a member more or less in the family, a new abode and/or job. Here nothing so momentous has happened, but still a feeling of revolution is dominating me.
The most obvious event is that the twins have started school. C#2 has already achieved basic reading skills (in the native language, which is one where the connection between written and spoken is almost bijective).
C#3 is not so far, but on the other hand he's officially the second best player of "Fusball" (Tischfussball/calciobalilla) in our household, and I have to concentrate pretty hard to maintain my leading position. At least the long hours of training in my university years have now helped me gain the respect of my son.
My daughter C#1 is taking both english and german lessons this year. Since the summer she has obtained a weekly allowance, and yesterday she spent some of it for the first time. She bought a "Teach yourself spanish" book. All I can say is that deep in my heart my 8-year-old self is dying with envy.

But the main change is that I'm putting order in my life, inside and outside. I've organized my new bedroom, formerly known as family storage area (what used to be mine is now C#1's). I'm not yet done, but I'm on my way to have a snug home office. And I've reorganized my office. Not only can one finally see the floor, and the cleaning ladies have actually started to clean it, but I know what's where - well, there are still some piles of junk I have to go through, but I'm definitely improving.

Last week I had my first (small) political victory in my current "leadership" position (the one half of my colleagues thought I was unfit for). This required a lot of organizing, but I'm quite happy with the result and especially with my choice of allies. And a colleague told me that I've managed to change my speech style: he said I sound much more professional.
I'm also starting to work together with the very few other female professors; that's particularly useful since we're distributed across fields and can give each other inside information on what the other groups are thinking.

And tomorrow I'm going to a conference: I have a pleasant and productive week in front of me.

On the republican VP candidate

2008-08-29T19:48:00.003+01:00

It's kind of weird to think that on the tickets in the US there's a man the age of my husband, and a woman (almost) my age. It's even more impressive to think that she has managed to pursue a demanding career while giving birth to five children, the youngest born April 2008. The youngest also has Down Syndrome.
Apparently, Palin declared herself surprised since "her other pregnancies went so well". On the other hand, she's pro-life, so she decided to continue the pregnancy, after discussing with her husband.
Everybody is saying how nice this is, to see somebody who really believes in what she says (Palin is very strongly pro-life).
Somehow, I'm not so impressed. Palin went back to work three days after the child was born. It seems evident that, whoever has to spend hours and hours bringing this baby to the doctor, to the logopedist, to the physical therapist, etcetera, it will not be Ms Palin. So what will she do? Maybe nurse him. Spend some "quality time" with him. I mean, whatever time she can spare for her already existing children - the eldest is going to Iraq in September, but the other 3 still at home.
So let's recap. This woman chose to have a child at an age where she knew that Down Syndrome had a very high likelyhood. She knew that she was well to do enough that she wouldn't have to give up her job, and her life, and her husband, and her other children, to take care of the newborn however sick he was. So she made the same decision I made, when I decided not to test my feti for genetic anomalies. I knew that it wouldn't be the end of my life, either (although I'm sure glad that mine are so far healthy).
I fail to see how this example has any relevance to the many, many women who choose to abort a handicapped fetus. Or who choose an abortion for a million different reasons, most of which Ms Palin has no experience of.
Still, if she's the choice, maybe the Republican will stop saying that Obama is unexperienced? McCain is 72 and a cancer survivor; the chances that his VP will be promoted President are definitely significant.

Against parenting.com

2008-08-23T14:43:00.002+01:00

I actually don't have anything against them. Except for the immensely imbecile article they wrote, which appeared on cnn (and I saw via Feministing). Title: Boys will be boys, girls will be girls from birth.
They have a list of "scientific facts" none of which is accompanied by even the remotest reference. The nearest they go to a reference is saying that a study was carried out by "psychologists at Cambridge, England" - and it is in fact a study on something strange, namely whether one-year old would rather look at talking faces or at windscreen wipers. Seems totally irrelevant to me.
The few studies (some more are mentioned without a reference, all of a similar kind) are interspersed with the journalist's prejudice, for which no reference is even attempted: e.g., that girls have more interest in clothing and shoes than boys do.
Of course I could make a big case of how I have precisely one child (my son C#2) who really cares about clothing, and especially shoes, and how he has recently (age 5) discovered jewels and is perpetually asking for becklaces and bracelets. But I won't. I'll just sit there and worry about the antifeminist backlash on both sides of the Atlantic, after having learned that Obama chose a 65-year old catholic as vp, and is being increasingly wishy-washy about the abortion issue.

Busy days

2008-05-28T11:10:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I had an administrative meeting. It started at 9.30 am, paused for 15 minutes for lunch, and at 4pm the rest of it was rescheduled for tomorrow morning. This morning I lectured two hours; I'll spend most of the afternoon doing oral examinations, and I'm giving a talk tomorrow afternoon.

I spent last Saturday socializing with C#1's schoolmates and their parents, and Sunday caring for two more kids than usual while their parents took an afternoon off. They offered to have my kids Monday evening, so that I could have a date night with my husband. When I arrived home Monday in the late afternoon, C#1 had sprained her foot, so my friends took care of C#2 and C#3, while we spent our "date night" queuing at pediatric emergency ward (five days of rest, than good as new).

I definitely need summer vacations, but that has to wait until mid-July.

Plannning research time

2008-05-09T14:12:00.003+01:00

I thought I had a great idea, namely to leave my schedule completely free on fridays. For some reasons, fridays there are less students around, so I figured out it would be a great day for getting some research done.
Two fridays in the last four turned out to be vacations/strikes (at school, which means I can't work). Today all seemed fine and promising - and when he woke up, C#3 couldn't walk. Well, he could walk a tiny bit, limping, and crying with pain.
So I called the pediatrician, and he squeezed me in at 9.45am - which means we got in at 10.30, and out at 11. Current diagnosis is arthritis, and I just spent some time looking up several versions of arthritis on wikipedia. None of them looks any good.
C#3 is home now; he feels better after some medication, and nanny is with him. Still, I somehow can't think of research at all. Unless it is on medline, that is.

Movie rerereview

2008-05-06T08:13:00.003+01:00

A movie review is what you write after having seen a movie. A movie rerereview is what you write after having read what someone wrote after talking to someone who saw a movie.

I'm talking about Fermat's room, and I am going only to make comments on the (re)review. It's a movie about four mathematicians who get together to solve(?) Goldbach's conjecture. It's apparently an appreciated movie (possibly because the actual purpose of the meeting is to kill them all).

What I found most incredible is "four mathematicians who don't know each other". What? Four number theorists, good enugh that it at all makes sense to assume that they have a chance at Goldbach's conjecture, and they don't know each other?

I should have spent the day on the beach

2008-04-24T18:24:00.002+01:00

Today the weather was gorgeous. Sunny, dry, with just a few white clouds to make the sky prettier.
And I feel I wasted it. I barely managed to prepare my lecture (because of discussions with students), gave my lectures, talked with students/postdocs/colleagues the whole afternoon. And now I am too tired to do anything useful.
Luckily the weekend is on its way.

Sunshine

2008-04-23T13:26:00.003+01:00

This morning was a bit more work than usual, since C#1 had a guest for the night, her tall, blonde friend CelticPrincess. It was hard to convince them that bedtime had arrived. This morning, however, they behaved very well and went to school on time. We might soon organize a double visit, with CelticPrincess' brother (aka CelticPrince) also spending the night - he's the same age of C#2 and C#3, although significantly larger.

I spent some time organizing the children's summer activities, the family vacation, and booking visits to a house we may want to buy(!). I then gave a lecture, talked to a number of students, and have yet a few more meetings before I go pick up C#1 (who has two extracurricular activities on wednesday afternoon).

What is really really useful is my new computer, my first tablet pc. What used to be my own lecture notes, scribbled on several sheets of paper which promptly got lost, is now an editable file which all of my students get a copy of. Which means that in later years the same notes can be used for self-study, or to organize a student-run seminar. I just wish I had bought it earlier.

And if next weekend the weather keeps good, it's time to go to the beach. I love summer, even when it's still spring.

Scientiae carnival: changing career prospects

2008-04-22T16:23:00.003+01:00

When you have to make an official speech and have no idea what to say, you can always start with "it's not an end, but a beginning": works at graduation, weddings, but also retirements and even funerals, apparently.

Amazingly, it is also true in my personal life. Ten years ago I wanted to achieve a good solution to the two-body problem, and a family. Five years ago I had achieved that, and was struggling very hard to balance. Now it's getting easier, and I am finding time for further debate.

What kind of advisor do I want to be? How many students can I deal with at one time? How do I choose them? What are my duties towards them during and, possibly more importantly, after the PhD studies? It took me way too long to realize that I can choose the number of my students, just as I choose that of my children (or, more precisely, that of my pregnancies).

Should I, or should I not, go into "sidetracks" like university politics, didactical efforts, and scientific divulgation? I enjoy a bit of this, but do I have the time? On the other hand, can I afford not to be involved in the decisional process?

How do I balance work and family time? As my children grow, I feel I should spend more time (working) at home, so as to be there if they need me. Is this possible? What can I do to facilitate it? It doesn't help that seminars tend to be scheduled in the afternoon, sometimes late in the afternoon, but not in the morning. Maybe I can change that? For next year, I am actually planning to go home midafternoon at least two days per week.

The most important question is, what do I want to do research on now? Gone are the times when I would write and publish anything I could prove; I don't have time for everything anymore, especially if I want to save time to keep learning new things. So I have to make choices, bet on what I think are the most interesting options. At the same time, I feel it's important to follow my own taste, do whatever I think is relevant even if in the short term its impact might be limited.

As a related question, I have to choose which activities (schools, conferences, research institutes) I attend. I can't go everywhere I am invited to. And often a serendipitous choice has proven much more useful than I would have thought (last instances: a school in January, which spawned a research article, and a conference on topic A, not so interesting, which turned out to be packed with hard-to-locate experts in topic B).

Finally, like for everybody in academia, I have to consider in the back of my mind the possibility that I might work better elsewhere. It is not very likely to happen, since it's not so easy to move two full professors working in the same, pathetically small area of mathematics, and not being stars in it either, but it could still happen, and I like to keep my ears and my mind open - keeping in mind what the pluses and minuses would be for the children as well.

So how do I face all these choices? This is something I haven't changed at all, since the day, 20+ years ago, when I discovered that there was such a job as research mathematician and decided to try my best to do it. I get lots of information, both reading (on paper and on screen) and talking to people. I make diagrams and lists for myself, tables with possible plans, and so on.

And after I have removed the impossible and the unreasonably unlikely, I decide with my heart as well as with my brain (indeed, I suspect that in me these two organs have a strange short-circuit). I choose activities I enjoy, students and collaborators I find humanly likeable, participate in events that will make it possible for me to meet again pleasant people who live far away. I choose research problems that appeal to my mathematical taste, and don't worry on where I will publish the outcome.

That's what I have done so far, and it worked very well. It is funny because, although I am not a believer anymore, the idea was originally a religious one: I don't remember the precise words, but it was something like "look for the Kingdom of Heavens, and the rest will be given you as a free extra". Similarly, in my life I have looked for beauty, love and happiness. The rest (a good job in a reasonable university) more or less happened by itself.

I was lucky, but not terribly lucky: it wasn't so hard then. I am sad that I don't see a similarly straight path for the younger people I advise, unless they are willing to leave their country (which I now am, but wasn't at their age). I try to be very honest with them, and I keep hoping that times will change again.

This post is written for scientiae-carnival, which is organized at A Cat Nap by Flicka Mawa.

Resuming, slowly

2008-04-22T16:20:00.002+01:00

Now that was a long break. I took some months off... well, just about everything, and devoted my time to research and parenting. It was great. Fabulous.

And it worked amazingly. C#1 stopped sucking her thumb! I can't believe it! And I have now a large (well, large for me) number of papers in the pipeline. Now I am back to teaching/administration duties/advising, so I will have to proceed more slowly.

After what feels like many, many years of winter, spring is really coming.

Long time no see

2007-12-27T16:45:00.000+01:00

A lot has happened since. Students S#3 and S#4 graduated, and they got postdocs for this year and next year. Also, S#6 who's graduating in 2008 already has an offer (and more to come - he has done a great job). S#6 had a brilliant idea, with a great statement and a bogus proof. I hope that soon she'll get the proof right. S#7 is also doing pretty well. So altogether I have now three students, since S#6 will probably never graduate, but become a brilliant teacher instead.

I got some administrative responsibility, which I'm making a mess of, but not worse than the previous holder.

On the family front, C#1 likes gymnastics much better than she did basketball. She has a new maths teacher and her problems with the subject seem to vanish; nevertheless, she seems to have inherited my reading style and not my math love.
To give you an idea, she got one 350-page book as Christmas present. She finished it yesterday morning, and at lunch time she was on page 250 of the second reading. She doesn't look like me at all, but she's definitely my daughter :-).

C#2 speaks german fluently, if rarely. He still can't write his own name, and complained that Santa brought a game with letters but none with numbers. C#3 is trying to write more and more, and we're confident that a breakthough on the diaper-in-the-night front is also near in time.

We had a lovely Christmas + Boxing Day, just the 5 of us plus nine-year old neighbor J as a bonus elder sister. We played bingo and Monopoly and two different versions of Labyrinth (ours and hers) and baked cookies and ate them. C#2 expressed as further wishes to Santa that C#3 stop crying so much, and that mama would tickle him (C#2, that is) more often. The second wish has been granted :-).

Mostly, I'm wondering whether to move to a scientific blog in my actual name. I feel that there are not enough women scientists blogging in their own name, and there are not enough mathematicians of any gender. Speaking of which, I'l include two great examples of math blogging: the latest John Baez, with a commented list of free math books online, and John Armstrong with a lovely "Yes, Virginia" Christmas post. Of course if I could write like either of them (both in style and depth) I would definitely blog under my own name.

In related news, C#1 figured out that it's not Santa that brings the presents. She looked very proud of herself, and not shocked at all.

Students update

2007-09-23T21:18:00.000+01:00

It seems to get slowly better. I have now read four of five pages of S#7 and it is all pretty reasonable. She is a bit creative with conventions for my taste, but I have to admit that the meaning is at all points totally clear. That's really good.
Unfortunately, tomorrow I will have only half a day for mathematics, since the afternoon I'll be busy with the birthday party, and the rest of the week I will attend a conference with the aim of improving my cv, not my mathematical culture. At least I should meet an old college friend, who chose a different side of mathematics and whom, as a consequence, I see rarely indeed.
I am also optimistic that S#3 and S#4 will finish their dissertations and get a postdoc; in the moment S#3 has a postod and S#4 a dissertation, but improvement is in the air. S#2 got a new postdoc, and a long well-paid one. Since S#1 chose to be a teacher, and S#5 has chosen to leave mathematics, I don't feel as bad as I did. And in a few weeks the number of students that I am responsible for will go down to four, two of them shared... I feel so excited, if I'm not careful I might as well accept another one!

Season change, or lack thereof

2007-09-23T21:01:00.000+01:00

I have finally finished selecting, washing, drying, folding and sorting the children's old stuff. Since I haven't done this basically since the birth of the twins, it was not only a herculean job but emotionally draining as well. As I dug deeper into the layer, smaller and smaller outfits came to the light, many of them still looking pretty new. I kept wondering where my lovely babies had gone, and who the big boys infesting my flat could possibly be.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to arrange immediate dispatching, so many boxes and bags are now lying around all over my bedroom and livingroom. A few of them contain also clothes of mine, including the elegant (and, you guess it, good-as-new) outfit I wore for my graduation - in my country we just wear nice clothes, nothing specifically academic. Hopefully all the boxes etc will be gone by tuesday: I can't help being a bit envious of Twice and every other mother of twins enjoying being part of such a group.
After all the work, the children started insisting that we go to the beach. Normally it's way too cold so late in the year, but the sun was shining, and I was exhausted... I decided, why not? The children bathed in very low, very warm water due to extremely low tide. I went with them, water until my knees, clean as it never is during summer, and basically all for us. We spotted crabs and fishes of various dimensions, and a large selection of shells. We stayed until the sun started setting.
On the way home, the twins fell asleep; after a quick dinner, all three are now peacefully sleeping.
It was a wonderful way to say goodbye to the summer, enjoying the calm sea and perfect limpidity of water and air, with dozens of sailing boats and behind them, in a bluish haze, the hills (and the factories, but maybe one needn't be too precise).

Intense week

2007-09-22T18:12:00.000+01:00

I didn't do any research this week. I spent several hours doing support to the students. I should be happy that they are getting productive, but this means a growing pile of mostly badly written and occasionally wrong theorems accumulating on my desk.
I wasted an outrageous amount of time doing university politics. I may or may not have an official administrative duty in the future (I hope not), but I will have to invest a lot of time doing brown-nosing, which is the officially certified method to get poitions in one's own field in my university. It is very sad, but I'd rather submit to the indegnity that have my student suffer from me being overworked; plus, one deserving young person will get a good job, if I play my cards right. Still, part of me hopes to move eventually to a better and more honest place, if one exists.
I dedicated some time to maternal activities: I went to a meeting with the schoolteachers, planned a birthday party, and (drumroll) finished sorting and packing the enormous backlog of no longer needed clothes in our flat. Plus, I managed a trip to Ikea and bought a large amount of no frills storage funiture; when it will be delivered (by Ikea) and mounted (by WS, with some paid assistance) I expect a much neater household. I already reorganized C#1's clothes cupboard, and the twins' is due tomorrow. Mine will have to wait for a new, unbroken cupboard. I am still overdue in organizing the children's extracurricular activities: C#1 wants to try a new sport, for which she needs a medical certificate, C#3 will do violin, or swimming, or both, and C#2 will most likely sit on a chair and suck his index finger.
Next week I'm off to a conference, and after that courses start. I am wondering when I'll start to do research again, and hoping that it won't be too long.

Parents undressed

2007-09-22T17:53:00.000+01:00

Slate has an article with the fascinating title "Are children harmed by seeing their parents naked?". The article itself is even more fascinating, since it completely avoids the question in the title. It starts by declaring that no studies exist, so in a sense the answer is "we don't know".
It then proceeds to say that younger children may not notice and in any case will not remember, so they should be no problem.
Mercifully, it also mentions that breastfeeding doesn't cause trouble, at least at age 12 months. I can't say anything about later ages since my kids decided to stop breastfeeding not much later than that.
It then goes on to discuss possible problem mentioned by adolescent psychiatrists. However, no evidence is given for such problems. It finishes by explaining at what age children want to stop using the other sex's bathroom, and what age girls don't want to be bathed by father any longer.
There are a few points I would like to raise. First of all, it should be very easy to study children of nudists, and see whether they have any specific sexual trouble. After all, there are plenty of people who go vacationing in nudist beaches with children.
Then, it should be possible to compare americans with northern europeans, who are used to seeing grownup nudity (e.g., when people change bathing suits on the beach they don't cover up).
Finally, a few remarks about my own kids. We are raising them as I was raised: going to the bathrrom for solid reasons demands a closed door, since concentration is required; any other activity does not prevent the use of the bathroom by the rest of the family. If you think this is crazy, try to grow up in a household with only one bathroom and see where this leads you.
My children know how they differ from each other, and from us. We have explained that grown ups have hair under their armpits and between their legs, that men have a larger didi then boys, and that girls and women have a didi so small that it's hard to see. We also explained that women need a diaper on a regular babies, since they loose blood; this is the blood which forms a nest for a baby inside the mother, and when it has been there too long and no baby needs it, it gets thrown out before it goes rotten.
My kids are squeamish about using the "wrong" public toilet, and they insist that their clothing and haircut corresponds to societal standard for their gender. They also prefer to pee privately, I suspect (but have only circumstantial evidence) so as not to use toilet paper.
I always saw my parents naked, and I grew up more or less normal. Or maybe I didn't, and haven't noticed yet.
However, one question about this article is really, really important to me now: is there a way to make sure boys do not want to be bathed by mommy anymore? I certainly wouldn't mind sharing the bathing duties along gender lines: C#1 showers on her own, needing only a look to check that all the shampoo has been rinsed from the head, while the twins resist and C#2 has still a strong opposition to having his hair washed. Had I known for sure that less nudity in the household would have led to me avoiding bathing duties for the twins, I would bought a burqa years ago.

Growing old and liking it

2007-09-19T13:14:00.000+01:00

As their hair slowly turns grey, or red as the case may be, most women encounter a series of physical changes. However, many of them, my own mother among them, maintain a fully feminine body despite the advancing years; others, like my children's nanny, surpass their own already considerable achievements in matters of softness of the chest area.
It is pleasant to know that I am not alone in belonging to neither of these categories.

Good mothers

2007-09-19T10:45:00.000+01:00

With my usual delay I noticed a very good post at Tertia's So Close with an awesome list of comments.
Many mothers (fathers are mysteriously, or maybe not so mysteriously, absent) argue repeatedly the same point: that as a mother you do your best, and have to work with the child/children you have. No a priori method works in all cases, and different children have different time schedules for reaching benchmarks like sleeping through the night or stopping diapers/pacifiers/bottles.
Mothers of twins have an even clearer understanding of that, since they often behave in totally different ways: even same sex twins do that, and I understand even identical ones.
I think the post above should be mandatory reading for every first-time pregnant woman, and for any of the many people who are always ready to criticize other people's educative methods.

Alternatives

2007-09-14T17:28:00.000+01:00

In the past two days I spent a nontrivial part of my time and most of my energy discussing hiring policies in our insitution with a number of people, including all the colleagues in my research group and the head of the whole institute. The result is that important information has not been forwarded, and other has been "lost". As a result, a position which we had planned on advertising soon also got "lost", and someone who is in his late forties, married and with a child on the way might or might not be given the tenure track position that was informally promised to him years ago. The same position that prevented him from getting an offer anywehere else "because we know you're going to be hired at XXX".
In particular, I am faced with the following two alternatives:
1) ether the head of the institution, or the head of my research group
is
2) either a liar or imbecile.
I am trying to decide which alternative I like less. Or more.

As a side remark, the head of the institution said several times that I am "cute" and referred to me by a diminutive form of my first name (say Venny instead of Estraven) which in our language would only be appropriate for a child.

I got too many invitations to conferences. When am I ever going to write a paper again?

The usual double standards

2007-09-07T12:26:00.000+01:00

Newspapers everywhere have been full of sadness and lament over the death of Luciano Pavarotti. The world-famous tenor, who died at 72 of cancer, is survived by his three grownup daughters from the first marriage and his 4-year old daughter from the second marriage. A twin brother of the latter died in childbirth.
I am of course sorry for any loss, and the fact that I cannot tell the difference between a good and a bad singer doesn't prevent me to realize that he had exceptional gifts; he was also, as far as one can tell from the outside, a generous person who tried to raise money for the less fortunate.
But I can't help noticing that nobody is interviewing philosophers or priests as to the morality of having a child when you're 68, just as nobody started discussing whether the death of the twin was related to receiving a 68-year old's faulty gametes.
I wish I could say that he gets special treatment because he was such a great artist. But I am concerned that he only gets it because he's a man. The same newspapers and magazines were full of contempt for a woman who had twins in her sixties not long ago.
Addendum: In fact, despit the catholic doctrine not admitting divorce (and therefore not recognizing second marriages), Pavarotti is going to have a church funeral.

Half and half

2007-09-05T18:33:00.000+01:00

I spent this morning being a mother. Or maybe a Übermother, considering that I had three guest kids visiting: one girl the age of C#1 and two boys the age of C#2 and C#3. I managed to do two washing machines, hang one and a half, clean up the kitchen, and prepare enough lasagna for everybody: all this in my spare time from the main activity, i.e., preventing the kids from killing each other and destroying the flat.
I am pretty proud of myself, and view this as an investment in the future (at some later day, the parents of the guests will be taking care of my kids). I only regret that I didn't get to eat any of the lasagna, so I had to grab a sandwich and a coffee before facing the afternoon as scientist.

2-3pm: discussion with the consultant for european grants. I did learn something, in particular that I just missed a deadline, but also that there is a very interesting call coming up in January 2008 and one in May. I just can't believe I can produce a decent proposal in time.
3-4pm: student S#6 tells me about the new reference he has found, and the progress he expects to make about that. We discuss some projects about how to organize his work in the next months.
4-5pm: S#4 and I go through the Nth version (for N>100 - she has at least one a day) of her thesis. Some of the major problems have been solved, but she still has a writing style too close to physics. Improvement is evident and I try to be optimistic.
5-6pm: S#3 and I go through his proof of something which I thought should be obvious but ended up not being so. It seems this time he has really fixed it, but some further adjustments are needed (especially "easy" details). I hope for best and we plan to meet again on friday.
6-6.50pm: S#9 tells me he has finished working out the details of the proposition we discussed last time. The result is pretty much of the kind I hoped it would be. I outline what the next steps are supposed to be, and we start discussing the table of contents of his thesis. He might have proven everything he needs to prove before Christmas. Then we discuss which techniques he should use to prove the remaining steps. At 6.50pm his alarm goes off and he tells me I should go home. He is that considerate.
6.50pm: I call WS and ask him to go home. I also tell him what edibles our refrigerator and our deepfreezer contain.
6.50-7.30pm: continue discussion with S#9, including which school/conferences he should attend and when precisely he needs to have a readable, preliminary version of the thesis ready - and why.
7.30-8pm: wasted time on the internet in a desperate attempt to unwind. I feel like I don't have a brain any more.

Many thanks to Sciencewoman for having this idea of charting down how to use your time.

Home improvement, and other weekend employment

2007-09-03T16:59:00.000+01:00

I spent a lot of the weekend planning changes in the way our flat is organized. It is reasonably large, at least for the standards of the country I live in, but it's totally messy. Some of the cupboards don't open and close properly, and a few drawers are really in bad repair.
I don't have the time to go looking in different shops, plus WS and I like Ikea furniture anyway. So I spent several hours over the weekend searching the Ikea catalog and checking online whether the stuff was actually in the store. As usual, the store nearest to where I live has only about a third of the stuff listed on the catalog, so I will have to face a really long drive.
WS does most of the mounting, but he hates choosing. So I just took all the measures, made plans, ad showed him a list with the final result. He then suggested a few changes, but basically approved: we have known each other for almost two decades and can estimate pretty well what each other likes.
The main aim I have is that the children learn to keep their own stuff in order: to do that, they have to know where things should be put, and everything has to be easily accessible. Some signs of slow improvement are already visible: they did put away some toys, after being asked and being told which box they should use. I also did some tidying up so that now all the Duplos are together (I should buy Legos soon, I know - but I first need a good box!).
And I can't very well complain that they don't keep the books in order when there's entirely too little shelf space for their books to fit in. I wonder how other parents face this problem; C#1 laments that she doesn't have enough books, that she has read them all and is totally bored.
I spent a couple of hours supporting WS's mood, too. This involved listening at length to the precise symptoms of his latest ailment (he hurt his own shoulder doing sports) and hearing all the details of his latest research project, which is very far from the overlap of our scientific interest and required really a lot of focussing on my part.
I also spent two hours helping a visiting colleague who is going to be here for a month: I picked him up at the station and showed him around, politely explaining that yes, some people here might speak english, but he shouldn't count on it. Maybe I shouldn't have done that, since he's not visiting me at all, but I felt kind of sorry for him; the person who invited him will not be back for a few more days.
Finally, I am proud to say that with ten days still to go, the list of stuff to buy for the new school year of C#1 (which has been stuck on the fridge since June) has now been completely ticked off. Everything is ready. Fall may come now.
Still, I hope I will manage to go the seaside next weekend.

How much housework should children do?

2007-09-01T19:04:00.000+01:00

I just read an article on the Guardian about a topic I have recently given a lots of thought to: children and housework. As a totally spoilt only child, I never did much. I helped preparing the table (at 7-8), filling and emptying the dishwasher (at 10-12), and keeping my stuff in order whenever I was yelled at.
I didn't make my bed since my grandmother found I couldn't do it right anyway. I never cooked anything or used the washing machine; only halfway through my teenager years I discovered how the vacuum cleaner works.
As a result, or maybe not, I am a total slob. My dream is to live in a room-and-board situation when someone else cooks for me, washes, irons and folds my clothes, and cleans up my room. Funnily enough, this is precisely how I lived in my years as a student, and I loved it.
So I feel kind of awkward asking my children to do anything. Still, I think I will soon start having C#1 prepare the table and put the dishes in the dishwasher, maybe introducing symultaneously a weekly pay. That's what my parents did: the money I received was supposed to be payment for my household work. Is 7 old enough? Should I wait until she turns 8?
As for C#2 and C#3, I have started yelling at them to put away their toys, with as good as no success. I am also meditating a "from now on you wipe your own ass" official declaration when they turn 5, but maybe I should wait a bit longer. I'm just so fed up with it.
Anybody has thoughts or suggestions on this? WS is not able to give competent advice, since he never helped much in the house either, and his mother is the only woman I know who's even more of a slob than I am (thankfully, or he would find it very hard to live with me).

Making order

2007-08-31T17:35:00.000+01:00

The week now closing has been nonexistent from a research viewpoint, due to excessive time spent with the children. So I did other things.
I started tidying up the clothes and shoes cupboards at home. I sorted through piles of stuff which doesn't fit any child in my household anymore, and divided the better (to be given to friends with younger kids) from the not so bad (to be donated to charity) from the bad, which I threw away. Having empty space is a lovely feeling, and I hope I can keep going.
It is a lot of work, though.

Elegance and science

2007-08-31T08:42:00.001+01:00

When I think of the word elegant in a scientific context, it is usually in the sense of "The Elegant Universe", although of course I think that mathematics is way more elegant than physics will ever be :-). However, occasionally one has to consider that elegant for a human being usually means well dressed.
The only time I saw Lisa Randall, that is what impressed me most: that she is carefully
dressed in a way that most scientists (female and not) aren't. Well, that and the fact that her handwritten slides where so hard to read: I can't deal with makeup but at least my handwriting is more elegant than hers. Unfortunately I also didn't understand her talk, but that was entirely due to my lack of an appropriate background.
I don't find it bad that Tommaso Dorigo commented on her looks: she obviously gives this issue a lot of care. I did go back and read previous reports of talks by Dorigo: he never seems to refer to the looks of the speaker, male or female, but in the case of Randall he made an exception, because the looks are really striking in this case.
As Tony Smith pointed out in the comments to a later post by Dorigo, she even made an appearance on Vogue: taken in context, her statement seems actually very reasonable, and not sexist at all.
This said, I don't think that people who criticized Dorigo for including a comment on Randall's looks and her attractiveness were totally unjustified. It also seems to me no coincidence that negative remarks came both from female and minority physicists. Unfortunately there are too many physicists who do not treat men and women on equal grounds (have a long read at FSP if you have doubts about it), and therefore even reasonable people have to watch their language.
I also don't agree at all with Dorigo in the third point of his subsequent explanatory post: politely requesting pc language (not imposing it, mind you) is a reasonable thing to do. When your words are wrong, your thoughts can easily go wrong, too. In the US, eliminating the word negro from polite conversation hasn't eliminated racism. But I still view it as a progress.

Family work in a man's words

2007-08-29T19:22:00.000+01:00

Via Salon, I found this lovely article on the New York Times. It's about a work-from-home dad who complains about how much timewaste a family actually is: in particular, how much times goes wasted in small daily emergencies. Nothing new there for me, now.
I occasionally wished I had known about this before the children were started. Maybe I would have reconsidered WS's suggestion that being an only child could have positive sides. I will try to remember this next time I compare my publication list with that of scientists with spouses who take care of all this extra work.
I actually do a bit more of my fair share, but then WS does more of the routine tasks because he hates the emergencies even more than I do. I am also ashamed to say that reading the article made me think "How long have the children gone without seeing a pediatrician?".

It's not an end, but a beginning

2007-08-29T16:27:00.000+01:00

Here the world as we know it has come to an end. If I were writing german I would say that we have a Super-GAU (it roughly means the worst possible disaster, one which is out of control): the nanny took an extra, unauthorized-but-paid week of vacation, and the summer camp canceled the current week. So we (or, in this case, I) have the kids with me the whole day. Of course the weather, hitherto perfectly sunny, has decided to turn bad precisely this week.
I spend part of my time doing children shopping for the winter, like school stuff, shoes, and clothes, and some in my office, trying to get something done while the kids sink in an orgy of DVD's. All this interspersed with playground hours and organizational meetings with other parents for childcare and birthday parties.
A very beautiful essay I read long ago (I can't even remember what language it was in, much less the author), suggested that "It's not an end, it's a beginning" is a good guideline for any official speech: at a graduation ceremony, at a wedding, a retirement party, and even at a funeral. It applies well now, as the academic new year's eve approaches fast.
In particular, I used the occasion of being stuck in my office with a blaring cartoon movie to tidy it up and make order. I produced four large boxes of waste paper and three bags of junk, and my office looks much much better now.
I asked WS to throw away it all for me while I staid in the office with the children. He did it after receiving the following instructions: the boxes of waste paper go in the paper recycling bin; the bags of junk go in the general junk bin; you have to go there with the car since it is too far away to walk; the car is in the parking lot. Sometimes my spousal interations vaguely remind me of computer programming.
As I type, the children are colouring cartoon pictures on my desk, and I am trying to concentrate on doing some marginally useful work. I find it very hard to concentrate with all kids in the same room: legend has it that Euler could do research while kids played on his lap, so in principle it's not impossible (maybe that's how he got to publish as much as he did).
This year is really supposed to be a new beginning for me. I am reducing the number of students to a level compatible with my advising ability, I am going to spend some research time abroad with the whole family for the first time since the twins were born, and I am hopefully going to do some serious writing, both in research and on expository matter. I am cautiously optimistic. Happy New Year to everyone!

The end of summer

2007-08-23T13:18:00.001+01:00

Actually summer isn't finished yet. School start is yet more than two weeks away, and bathing season might go on even a little longer than that. But today it's raining hard, and my personal vacation is finished, while the child minder isn't.
So what did I achieve this summer? Nothing from a professional viewpoint. I didn't do anything at all for more than three weeks. I slept a lot, ate more than usual, and enjoyed my children. I even managed not to quarrel with my parents (I must admit they also tried very hard).
The children did a few amazing things: C#1 managed to write one nice diary entry as part of her homework. For the twins, C#2 stays dry through the night, and C#3 has learned to swim, but not conversely. The whole family has a very impressive suntan, and in particular the children have blatantly inherited my mediterrenean complexion and not WS's milky one.
I am now slowly trying to go back in a worklike frame of mind, which isn't easy since I have only very few hours per day to work and everybody else seems to be still vacationing. On the other hand, a lot of work is clearly lurking on the horizon.
I am excited and worried at the same time. As a child, I remember thinking that the end of summer/beginning of fall period feels much more like the beginning of a new year than Jan 1st does. As an adult, I feel this even more strongly. So happy new year to everybody!

I finally read the Deathly Hallows

2007-08-22T09:32:00.000+01:00

I know, everybody else has finished it weeks ago - and so far, I have only found time for one reading and one quick rereading. But I still wanted to write a short review, without spoilers.
Or, rather, since I seem to be uncapable of a coherent review, a list of remarks.

There's so much there about the trouble of growing up, and the specific case of doing so in a boarding school. Very british, all that, including the division in houses.
I have staid in a student dorm for years. We didn't have four houses, but a clear cut division science/humanities. I really felt at home at Hogwarts. (I know, this contradicts the above. So sue me).
I didn't like very much the writing style. Some parts are just too long, to my taste. Luckily I read really fast.
I love the new words she invents. I wish we could hire J.K. Rowling and have her name all new mathematical concepts.
I disliked the epilogue. Sorry. Too much information, and at the same time not enough.
I am kind of impressed that such a mainstream novel is completely and totally atheistic. In particular the characters face a lot of life-and-death choices in a very moral (or immoral, as the case may be) way without the need to refer to any organized religion. I am wondering in particular whether JKR purposefully wanted to show that life and death can have a sense even without a belief in a life after death. A question that I never found easy.
I find the atmosphere of loss of democracy through/followed by ad hoc laws and a control of the media extremely disturbing. Maybe because I see so much media control in reality. Of course in fact she's just giving as a history course, and the worst things she mentions are in our past and (hopefully) not in our future.
I want to make a final remark which contains a spoiler. So I am putting it as first comment.

Love thy colleague

2007-07-28T22:31:00.000+01:00

I was very surprised when, a few days ago, I read in a comment by Count Iblis on Am I A Woman Scientist?'s blog that he manages to write papers with people he has never met. Since I have done plenty of collaboration with people who were physically far away, I stopped, and asked myself why I found it so strange.
The answer is, of course, that all my co-authors have been friends; indeed, we were friends or at least good acquaintances even before we became co-authors. Indeed, the relationship goes both ways: I have expanded my research field in certain direction, in order to read papers by people I found interesting, or even so that we could collaborate. On the other hand, I have become a close friend of researchers I started talking to because of pure scientific interest.
Indeed, more is true: I tend to think of the mathematicians in my field, those that I have known now for one or two decades and that I occasionally meet somewhere in the world, those that I invite to my conferences and whose papers I referee (and conversely), as my "village". That is, the place where I am at home; where people know me and accept me as I am, including plenty of problems (when I read of people complaining about slacker co-authors... well, that's usually my role).
Although I still keep contact with some of my pre-university friends, they are not so many, and the contact is infrequent. The friends I've kept for three decades now are those who at least try to understand why it is reasonable that I occasionally leave husband and children behind and travel to another town, or country, or continent, to try and prove theorems.
My social network in the town were I live tends to be composed of other parents with a university culture and a taste for books. Some are scientists in other fields, others are married to scientists, and all have some kind of curiosity or at least respect for the world of science; they are my models in my attempts to do public outreach (attempts that include this blog, of course).
So there's one part of balancing work and love, the brain and the heart, that I find very easy: namely, a lot of the people involved are the same.

This post is written for scientiae-carnival, whose next edition is Aug 1st at Twicetenured.

I'm a Girl!

2007-07-28T18:17:00.000+01:00

And I Rock! Twice nominated me as

It actually happened some days ago, but this is as long as I struggled with finding a honest way to produce the above effect. Finally, with departure approaching, I gave up and just did a cut and paste from Twice's source file. I hope she doesn't mind: americans usually have a different attitude then europeans (well, than me) about copying, but hopefully it only applies to exams.

I will eventually find the time to put the comments where they belong, but in the meantime I would like to tag

Am I a woman scientist? who helps to be more realisitc as to how much better my life would have been had I chosen to work in Scandinavia. I understand that she has way too much to do, but this doesn't make her less awesome.

Sciencewoman, who is right now starting a new life as mother and tenure track faculty.

Jane, who manages to go to conferences and give talks while traveling with Baby Jane.

These are three women scientists with children whose age a in years satisfies |a|<1, i.e., they are at a time when I was exhausted all the time. Very happy, very exhausted, and very inefficient. So best wishes to all of them!

Brief rants

2007-07-27T18:09:00.000+01:00

I'm in a tremendous hurry, so I can't rant properly now.
I first got angry at William Saletan claiming in Slate that people should dump their fat friends and get skinny ones: I'm on the skinny side myself, but I choose my friends with different criteria and so, I hope, does everybody else. The analysis he gives of the statistical data he quotes is totally nonsensical. But I often get pissed at him, so that's not surprising.
I'm much more impressed with being angry at Salon's Broadsheet, where Carol Smith advocated that it was right for a daycare center to fire a woman who didn't go to work because her husband had battered her too badly. The argument was "If her (ex) husband beats her up, she obviously is not comptetent to be a daycare center educator". Sorry? Uh? I couldn't believe my eyes. Her husbands beats her and it's her fault? And a woman says that? Angry is too weak a word. Maybe it's a good occasion to stop reading both Salon and Slate and get much more productive.
Update: it turns out women under 30 aren't allowed to choose which contraceptive method they want to use. That is, they are, so long as it's not tube tying. In fact, one can still have children after that, by IVF. The ovaries don't get removed or altered. But of course, women aren't ever really grownups, right?

It's that time of the year

2007-07-27T17:53:00.000+01:00

Several weeks of summer vacations await me. So of course there has been a tremendous last-minute rush of things to do, especially since everyone else seems to have left at mid July. So I was the only one to answer the phone when questions arose from the administration.
Also my research students wanted extra office hours (we are talking of something like a total of three hrs/day in the last two weeks).
The paper with PD#1 and S#6 is finally ready. I am very, very happy with it, even though it is not a very great result. It is one of the few cases where I started with an idea of my own and saw it become slowly true. Of course I wouldn't have made it without my coauthors, but still it was my dream first.

I have said a bit too many times "yes" in the past few months, which means that I have agreed to write a number of non research articles of different kinds. I had the brilliant idea of planning to finish them all during the summer vacation: after all, for two weeks we are visiting my parents, and for one week we are going to a hotel with childcare.
The trouble is of course that my parents aren't willing to look after the children unaided for longer than 15 minutes, if at all, and that in previous occasions the hotel's children entertainment, while highly appreciated by C#1 and C#3, failed to satisfy the more discriminating taste of C#2. As a result, I was free to do any activity which could be performed while having on my lap 16 Kilos of child and/or running after said child who was obviously in training for some daycare level survival training.
So I will just summarize here the list of articles I have agreed to write, so that I can look at it occasionally:

an expository article on a topic I know very well, but from an angle I am not familiar with;
a short autobiography for a site about careers of women in science;
a short article on the relation between women and science for a magazine with a mostly medical audience;
another expository article on a topic I know very well, but which completely lacks readable references;
a short expository article on part of my recent work;
a short expository article about what I hope will become my future area of research;
a very short article on the life of Emmy Noether, of which I know very little.

Due dates are basically all in September, but I should plan in finishing during the vacation, because afterwards the doctoral students will need even more time. And, I will have to seriously start nagging C#1 about her homework (last year she didn't do any... and WS isn't really very good at this kind of things, so it's my chore).

Headache is over

2007-07-17T16:08:00.001+01:00

I am usually a very healthy person, and become easily obnoxious when faced with even the slightest physical inconvenience. I spent the last three days with a continuous headache, resistent against the usual painkillers I have at home. I have a very vague recollection of said three days, except that the weather was gorgeous and the children enjoyed every minute of it. Of course the culprit is the sun: I will have to get a hat. Sigh. It usually takes me no longer than three days at the beach to lose or destroy one, and most of them are too small anyway.

Today I finally woke up feeling normal, and I was so giddy with relief that I celebrated by doing almost nothing so far. That is, I talked to WS about something he needs to know for his current project, to a visiting scientist who explained to me some references I overlooked, to PD#1 and S#6 about our paper and in particular said references, to S#8 whose thesis is progressing really well, to S#4 who now should start writing up what she did in a reasonable way, and to FP1 and FP2 about some technical questions on Calabi Yau threefolds. As a result, I haven't started writing anything yet today, and I still have so much to do.

Tomorrow I will be in late - the new dishwasher should arrive - and spend one more hour attending a (hopefully interesting) talk by the visiting scientist. I also have to help WS plan an expansion for his research group which would also involve me and a rather interesting chunk of research money. Next week we have a very distinguished visitor, and then I'm going to go vacationing. Three weeks. I can't wait.

Writing science versus writing mathematics

2007-07-12T15:09:00.000+01:00

Dr. Freeride at Adventures in Ethics and Science wrote a post inspired by the book A Short Guide to Writing About Science by David Porush. She quotes from that book a list of "commandments" for scientific writers. I'm going to comment on that list from the perspective of a mathematician (the only one I have!).

Complex sentences are more precise and intelligent than simple ones.

This is definitely not true. Indeed, I have had to learn to keep it simple, since mathematical english uses much simpler structures than my native language. This is a clarity requirement, particularly needed since for most of us english is not easy.

Passive voice is more objective than active voice because active voice involves stating the agent, who is often a human, and humans introduce subjectivity.

Passive voice is never used, except in extremely straightforward contexts.

Descriptive prose is imprecise and unscientific because descriptions rely on adjectives which are often unquantifiable.

You can't possibly use descriptive prose in a statement or a proof, since mathematical language is so overpicky. On the other hand, descriptive prose is welcome in introductions, and everywhere else where you are trying to give euristic comments (which should be included!).

Claims about scientific fact must always be cautious; thus, using very cautious language -- squirrel language -- in scientific prose is always prudent.

We fine tune caution when we state conjectures (we have several synonyms, referring to different degrees of confidence). But when we prove something, there's no caution: we are proud of our achievement and we're totally sure! Occasionally mistakes are found, usually before physical publication.

Be as wary of innovation or taking chances in language as you are in the lab.

We need new words all the time! We both use standard ones with new meanings (a ring, a field and a module all have a precise definition) and invent new words (my favorite is crepant, as something for which discrepancy is zero). Finding good words to describe new concepts is one of the key duties of mathematicians.

Revision is unnecessary because knowledge is transparent.

What can I say? Some of us don't revise. They are hated by the whole community. The vast majority does.

In the comments, someone discussed whether things might have changed since Porush published the book in 1995. Maybe, but not in mathematics. We stopped writing complex sentences around roughly 1950 (reading older stuff is a pain, in any language) and the rest is even older. The only exception is the passive voice, whose perceived difficulty is in my opinion language-dependent.

Maybe mathematicians are really different from other scientists: e.g., the difference with physics is pretty noticeable even at the stylistic level.

In a hurry

2007-07-11T18:57:00.000+01:00

Today I talked to S#3, whose thesis project is unfortunately very, very slow. I told him to come back in two days. I had again a large number of meetings; I attended a talk by a very successful former graduate student of a colleague, and in the few spare moments started preparing the final version of the paper with PD#1 and S#6. I also achieved a very minor result from the point of view of visibility of my group within our department.

And now I'm going to have dinner out to celebrate PD#1 leaving us soon for a tenure position!

PS Lest I seem too efficient, I did skip one meeting. So I will have to read the notes tomorrow.

Fresh air, fresh ideas

2007-07-10T17:02:00.000+01:00

After a storm last night, the outside temperature went down a little bit. Today I feel more energetic and I actually managed to achieve something. Unfortunately no mathematical research yet.
I discussed with S#4 some more details of her thesis project, and gave her advice about telephone interviews and the next postdoc application. I reviewed with PD#1 and S#6 our joint paper, which seems finally to be in an advanced status of completion. Hopefully it will go on the web by the end of July. I outlined to S#9 my suggestions for the next step of his thesis project. He is also working on a side project that he came up with on his own, and for which he has managed to find the relevant literature. Sounds good.
On the service front, I had several meetings with a small but significant number of colleagues. I managed to get an extra grant for an advanced undergraduate student who wants to visit for a few months (all pro bono work, he is not in my field) and collected all the relevant information for a very important future meeting with the administration. I spent maybe three hours doing that; it seems I that no matter how much I hate administrative work, I am better at it than most of my colleagues or rather, as I suspect, they pretend to be not so good so that I do it.
I might soon have to tackle an administrative task of greater responsibility. I feel a bit ambivalent about this. On the one hand, I already have too little time for everything I like, and administrative work can be quite time-comsuming.
On the other hand, at least I can maybe stop complaining inanely about lousy and/or nonsensical decisions. I can do what I always wanted: work to change the system from within. And hope that the system doesn't change me instead.
Update: I even started writing up an article on women and science. In my own language! For the general public! I'm very happy, although I know that I will repent having accepted to do this.

Mediterranean diet

2007-07-09T17:19:00.000+01:00

My children's school provides lunch, and no other food is available, nor are they allowed to bring more than a midmorning snack from home. Lunch is planned by a dietologist and supervised by the teachers; the only drink served with lunch is tap water. This is not a fancy private school, but the state one - the one that everyone complains about.
At home we usually cook from scratch, with help from our freezer: some things are cooked in large amounts, portioned, frozen, and microwaved at need. We also eat plenty of less healthy stuff, but fresh fruit, some vegetables, and yogurt are general favorites.
None of this is special, and indeed most other families cook more: typically, a main meal should include two cooked courses and one cooked side dish. We tend to have one cooked dish and sides that need only short or no cooking: for instance raw tomatoes and bell peppers, briefly cooked carrots and peas. Drinking tap water or bottled nonsparkling water is also standard practice here.
Reading this article and especially the corresponding comment thread made me feel quite lucky. It even made me a bit less ashamed of my and WS's own poor cooking skills.

Homeopathy for scientists

2007-07-08T22:41:00.001+01:00

Twice described in her blog her successful attempts to explain to some relatives why homeopathic medication can't possibly work. I am of course impressed by her ability to discuss such topics with her family - I certainly wouldn't attempt that with my parents (and successfully silence my husband, who thinks homeopathy belongs in the group with astrology and superstition). More importantly, I must add that I did use homeopathic remedies myself, and gave them to my children.

I took homeopathic pills when I couldn't sleep because of contractions during my twin pregnancy. I never had serious problems, but in the last two months I was waking up many times per night and contractions, summer heat and double worries made it hard to fall asleep again. So every time I just took a few of my little white pills, and let them slowly melt under my tongue. I thought of my wonderful midwife who had given me the pills, and felt confident, relaxed and happy. I had made it once and would make it again. Did the pills help? Sure they did, even if they contained sugar as only scientifically detectable ingredient.

Does this mean I think homeopathy can work? No. I'm a scientist, and I can do the maths myself. But placebo effect works, as described e.g. in a long article in Der Spiegel a few weeks ago (sorry, I seem to be unable to find an internet reference). Homeopathy can indeed cure actual health problems by placebo effect, and no scientist should be ashamed to admit that. Because the placebo effect can be measured!

I also have another use for it, when the children have an illness for which the doctor recommends to just wait and do nothing since it will go away by itself. The following sample dialog happened several times, with different values for X and different pairs child/disease.
X: "Have you heard how bad C#3's cough is? You should (insert random proposal)!"
Me: "Don't worry, I am already curing him with homeopathic tablets".
X: "Oh well, are you sure it works?"
Me: "Well, the doctor said it could work, it doesn't have side effects, and we can still use something stronger if it doesn't work."
X: "Ok, but don't wait too long."

Hot summer days

2007-07-08T22:26:00.000+01:00

In case this wasn't clear by the lack of mathematics in my posts, I have been totally unproductive last week. I did spend a few hours explaining some technical stuff to my coauthors PD#1 and S#6, and discussing thesis progress with some of the students, but somehow this week was mostly spent planning for the future. I am almost done with planning my scientific travels next year, and have greatly restricted the choices for the remaining two weeks of summer vacation. I also bought all kinds of hopefully useful stuff: nothing at the sales (I might still find the time and energy to get a pair of shoes I can't go through the summer alternating Brikenstocks and trekking sandals, unfortunately) but home use material. Books, a cellphone for WS, a spare battery. I have also tried to buy a second iSight, and planned some much needed furniture replacement: three children shorten significantly the life span of a sofa, as I discovered.
Yesterday and today I could have staid home and tried to catch up on the missing work. Instead, both days were spent at the beach, and this evening at a fair, eating sausages and french fries, drinking beer, and watching C#1 and #2 dance together with the grace and sense of rythm they inherited from me - i.e., none whatsoever.
I discovered thus that C#2 is no longer afraid of the sea, and C#3 can more or less swim. They also accepted to have a cold shower on the beach before going home, and actually managed to have fun in the process. And I finally resumed my favorite hobby, sleeping on the beach. Two hours yesterday, and another two today.
I love my family, I love summer. I couldn't have spent these two days any better.
Hopefully tomorrow some of the energy I have accumulated will be transformed into theorems, instead of trickling out into phone calls to the electrician and travel and hotel reservations.

Nasty thoughts

2007-07-07T02:30:00.000+01:00

In the local news today was the story of a very unlucky man who was caught by a stroke while on his boat, and died immediately. They were near to the coast, so someone heard his 6 years old son's cries for help and rescued him. My first thought was one of deep sympathy for this man and for his family, having to face such a sudden, tragic death. This was also, very appropriately, the tone used in the newspaper article.
My second thought was unfortunately really nasty. The man who died was over sixty; what would the news have said had it been a 60+ old woman dying in front of her 6-yr old child? Would they all have resisted temptation to say "We told you it was wrong to have children when you're so old"?

Online quiz results are usually meaningless

2007-07-02T13:15:00.000+01:00

... but maybe this result should tell me something.

You Are 4% Girly

Um... you're a guy, right? If not, you're the most boyish girl in the world.
And for you, that's probably the ultimate compliment.

How Girly Are You?

A meme

2007-06-30T15:40:00.000+01:00

Twice tagged me with a simple meme, so I might be able to produce a readable post while listening to five children playing in the garden.

Rules

I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Random Facts

I utterly dislike most of a traditional housewife's chores: cooking, cleaning, ironing, etc. I am also mildly to very bad at each of these activities. However, I really enjoy grocery shopping. I like it so much that my children think it's fun and are always eager to come with me - they are quiet and helpful, which is quite unlike they usual behaviour.
I speak four languages fluently, and can read without big problems easy texts (say, mistery novels) in two or three more.
As a mathematician, I am a very slow learner; as a consequence, there is a lot of classical, standard stuff that I would like to know and don't.
I don't like music very much. I don't mind it, and I even have gotten used to some of it, but it remains a very minor pleasure for me. I don't dance, if I can at all avoid it.
I used to be a serious soccer fan: from age 12 to 18 I had a yearly ticket for the team of my home town.
I do not use computer programming in my work, and I never did. I tried once for a few months, and found it depressingly difficult.
I often read while getting dressed, eating, and brushing my teeth. And in most other "spare" moments.
I cut my children's hair myself.

I read a number of blogs by people who are too busy to write often. Therefore I'll tag IP at Irrational Point Soapbox, Åkerbäret at Tur i Oturen, Am I a Woman Scientist, and The Astrodyke. Yes, I gave myself a fifty percent discount on choosing eight names.

Last week vs next week

2007-06-30T15:09:00.000+01:00

I spent last week visiting WS's family. This involved doing absolutely no work, having no internet connection, and enduring a substantial amount of bad weather. On the other hand, I really like my mother in law, and it ended up being a very pleasant, relaxing vacation week. I am always a bit sad that we are so far away, so that every visit has to be carefully planned and ends up being quite a financial investment.

Still, I do appreciate being back to summer and wireless ADSL. The plan is as follows: today, grocery shopping and washing machine use (four so far); tomorrow, day at the beach, from monday, summer camp and back to work. I always did my best work in the summer, so I have big hopes for the next four weeks.

In the moment, there are five children shouting on my balcony. They have just eaten cherries and watermelon, and we may soon all go to a nearby playground. I do love summer.

The road not taken

2007-06-21T14:51:00.000+01:00

At this conference, I have had occasion to talk to some of the applicants I didn't accept for our postdoc position one month ago. They all seem to be excellent, and my feeling that I could have hired any, or all, of them and made a very good choice was even stronger. Luckily, but not surprisingly, they all have other offers.
Plus, I talked with a couple of more senior guys, basically people my age and scientific level, who don't yet have a position and are slowly contemplating the possibility that they might never get one. It seems so sad, and so unfair. These people aren't particularly good, but neither am I. I was always very career conscious (as opposed to "eventually I'll find something") so maybe I did do a bit more than them. But to stand next to them, and know that I'm full professor, and they hope to find another position next year... academiacan be really unjust. I wonder how the other full professors deal with this.

Old age strikes hard and unexpectedly

2007-06-21T14:48:00.001+01:00

Yesterday morning I pulled a muscle. While turning in the bed. I was handicapped the whole day, unable to deal with children, carry my laptop, and look leftwards. I had trouble swallowing and lifting any weight.
Today it's better, but not ok. I just hope this is not old age, otherwise I'll start sharing Leopardi's viewpoint. Except of course he never was as old as I am now.

Exhausted

2007-06-15T22:19:00.000+01:00

Today I picked up C#1 who had been visiting my parents. This involved a large number of hours on the train, with a shining sun and no air conditioning. I found some time to talk mathematics to S#3, who just needs to open his eyes, notice that his thesis is finished, and write it up. Hopefully this will happen soon.

I also spent some time equarreling (quarreling via email) with a number of colleagues, that are finding the most incredible excuses why they never can take into account what I say. I find that saying "I hadn't heard of that" from a recipient of an email which comes with a date and an hour and has been cc's to about 20 other people is ridiculous. I don't know if they will ever take me seriously. But I know that I can at least force them to listen to me, and I definitely will. Maybe if I am harassing enough, they'll do what I ask in the hope that I shut up.

The biggest change

2007-06-14T10:56:00.000+01:00

The theme chosen for this scientiae-carnival is Transitions.

This made me think. What was the biggest change in my life? Several natural choices are available: maternity, marriage, graduation... I first thought of discussing how it was to get tenure, something that was more important to me than marriage and children. Or maybe my first research result? My first paper on a toplevel journal? I finally concluded that no, it was none of the above.

The biggest change in my life was starting university. In particular, I remember the sunny morning when I found out I had been admitted.

Starting university in a top-level college meant that I overnight stopped being weird and became normal. I felt welcomed in a community which accepted me as I was, and didn't demand of me things that I couldn't or wouldn't do. Suddenly the fact that I don't understand much of fashion, or am clumsy in my movements, or have a very loud voice didn't count anymore. The shape of my nose and the size of my clothes stopped having any importance. What counted was my ability and willingness to work very hard, learn a lot, and eventually give my own contribution. I started respecting myself more.

The other key fact is that they paid me to do it. A few weeks after that sunny morning, I stopped being financially dependent on my parents: my grant included room and board, and some pocket money. Science has kept me ever since. Over the years, money was invested in me by a number of funding agencies, in my country and abroad: besides being useful in the obvious way, the money also helped me gain my parents' respect.

Not so long before starting university, I had seen the movie "Yentl" (yes, I'm old). As I stood there, contemplating my name in the list of the admitted, a song* from that movie resonated inside me: "There are moments you remember all your life. This is one of those moments".

*In the movie, the song celebrates the admission of a young woman (dressed as a man) to a male only school. It took me a long time to realize that it was appropriate in more than one way.

Running late

2007-06-13T19:27:00.000+01:00

I got to stay in the office late since I'm doing family work - i.e., booking the travel for a forthcoming trip. Now I got a desperate phone call: we just have one liter of milk left! For the whole family!

I think when I was living with my parents, even as a child, I never saw a milk carton larger than half a liter. most of the time, there was no milk at home. I would make some deep remarks but if I do the Last Food Store will close.

Book writing

2007-06-12T14:02:00.000+01:00

I have now started working on a project I have considered for a long time: a reference book. I'm not doing this alone, but even the little bit that I have to do myself feels like very hard work.

First of all, it is in some sense as hard as writing a research paper; many theorems are not proven in the literature, or they are proven but the proof is too technical and you start looking for easier proofs, or they are stated as "obvious" but turn out surprisingly difficult to write down in detail.

Plus, there's the difficult choice of how much to include; you cannot produce a book that no one will have time to read. In the moment we are trying to achieve a compromise, carefully labeling the material to distinguish core stuff from technical details, included only so that advanced users can find the necessary references.

Finally, you have to find meaningful examples and exercises. When you write an advanced mathematics book, it is tempting to stick to the "Definition-Lemma-Theorem-Corollary" format. But it is never a good idea. You need to give exercises, so that the reader can get hands-on experience of the new material, and examples, to connect what they have learned with what they knew before. In this particular case, it is likely that the book will be used as a reference by researchers with somewhat different backgrounds, so we need even more examples to accomodate them all.

We (here it means "me and coauthors") have decided to actually write two books: a more elementary one, which should be ready next summer, and an advanced one, to be finished in summer 2009. I do hope that we will manage, since now all the authors are either done with childbearing or not interested in it.

I am impressed by how some people either have an immense spare time or can write well fast. For instance, I am seriously considering telling my students to use The Unapologetic Mathematician as the main reference for category theory. He has written a number of beautiful, elegant posts, developing the subject in just the right degree of generality.

If I tried to do anything like that it would take me ages. And without outside help, it would never be as good. On the other hand, I am apparently the only one in my bookwriting project who is able or at least willing to take a particularly elementary approach (technically, I would call it more geometry, less algebra). So I think I should insist, however hard I find it.

Maybe I should do like See Jane Compute, and keep a sidebar with accomplished tasks. At least I would have three tasks accomplished before the deadline (namely C#1, C#2 and C#3).
I think they are unique wih this property: everything else I do, I am always late.

Patriotic metablogging

2007-06-11T22:08:00.000+01:00

Last week I was at a conference, and I spent all the time saying hi to old friends, gossiping, and occasionally discussing maths.
So to ease myself back into blogging, I come up with a comment post to A Natural Scientist's post about juggling parental and academic duties. If you haven't read the post, you should do so now. It contains the following, excellent sentences:

I have never once heard a young man in my class say 'I don't know if I could have children and tenure.'
If I can't have what I want- intellectually satisfying work AND children- I don't want to play that game.

What can I say, but add that I was blessed enough as to be able to have it all? I did have to make some choices. I don't earn as much as I could, and neither of us is at a great university. But we can do research, and we have some time for the children. We delegate housecleaning duties and a few hours of child minding per day; the latter will diminish as the children grow older and the internet connection at home gets faster.

A lot of this is only possible because I live in a country that is, by american standards, incredibly left wing. A country with great affordable childcare, and public schools open 8 hours a day. A country where married women keep their surname, and there is no social stigma on working mothers. I use to be very unhappy about my country, which has a lot of serious problems, but it has its good sides.

So to all of you who are struggling with a two-body problem, all I can suggest is: look over the Atlantic! Better places exist! Once you're tenured, you can relax and get children, and then start working hard again.

Of course, this requires two other careful choices: that of a partner willing to share with you the burden of parenting, and that of a research area where tenure arrives early on the biological clock.

And I feel it is my duty to say, loud and proud, that I have kids. In my institution, the other female professors average .25 children each, and the male professors don't mention their offspring until said offspring starts grad school. I want students to have at least one family-friendly role model.

As a part of that, I repeated to everybody at the conference that I was going home one day early to attend C#1's end-of-schoolyear theater play. Now I just have to print out a few photos to bring along and then I'm all set as a role model.

Redshirting? No thanks!

2007-06-05T16:58:00.000+01:00

The New York Times has an article about redshirting, which apparently means sending your child to school one year later than he/she should or could go. I found this via Twice's blog. The advantage, supposedly, is that older kids do better at school.

I sometimes wonder whether the Atlantic Ocean is more than a vaste expanse of salty water, since humans seem to behave so differently on different sides. In my country, redshirting is allowed but discouraged unless there are serious reasons for it. Sending your child to school one year earlier is allowed, easily or not depending how far away from the cutoff date (dec 31) they are born.

I did send my daughter, born january, one year earlier. She was already bored in daycare, and all her friends were going to school. She just finished second grade as very good student, and gets along very well with her schoolmates who are one year older than she is. It might help that she is also large for her age, so offers no temptation to possible physical bullies.

I was sent to school one year earlier, and I was born 11 months after cutoff. Yes, 11 months: almost a whole year. I was basically two years younger than the oldest. The decision was taken by my parents on the suggestion of the day care teachers, who noticed that I just spent a lot of time sitting in a corner and reading (technically speaking, I didn't go earlier but skipped first grade).

I was a top student all through my school years. At the end of highschool, 3 (including me) in a class of 14 finished with honors: all 3 were younger (the other two by 3 and 7 months after cutoff) and had skipped first grade. All had been sent ahead on daycare teachers' recommendation. The fourth student who was younger, and who got a modest mark, had been sent one year early so as to be with his cousin.

In my very selected university (with strict admission test), about 10 to 20 per cent of all students were younger than they should have been.

The only thing in which my experience reflects the NYT article's content is that all people mentioned were indeed not very good at sports (my daughter redshirted herself in her minibasket course!).

I am wondering whether the difference might be related to the fact that in my country essentially all the children go to very good, very cheap state-run daycare centers for three years, and hence even younger children get prepared to the most difficult task in school: namely, sitting down and listening for more than five minutes in a row.

It's raining heavily...

2007-06-01T14:34:00.000+01:00

maybe the end-of-the-schoolyear outdoor party of C#1 tomorrow will be canceled?

I spent some time today helping S#3 with her thesis, and I really hope she will get an offer soon. She deserves it, if not for the results for the effort she has put into this.

I had lunch with a visiting mathematician from India. She told us about her new, exciting project: being part of a commission advising the government on how to improve education across the country, particularly among the poorest people. They have already made big progress, but some states are apparently lagging behind. I found it cool that a government would ask actual scientists for such advice, and she answered that this is because both the President and the Prime Minister are or rather have been working in academia. I did let out a very, very small sigh.

I just spent one hour fixing the paper with PD#1 and S#6; it should be ready, if all is well, by the end of the month. I do resent that these two inexperieced people do not accept my suggestions but have their own views... except that about half the time their views are better than mine! The only thing in which I am obviously the best author is english spelling.

I recently found out that a workshop I co-organized last year has retroactively run out of money. I will now see what I can do to fix this, so that I don't get a reputation of cheating people out of their money.

Finally, I got an invitation for a kind-of-prestigeous conference. It's not very prestigeous, especially because obviously I have been called as a replacement for a last-minute defection, but it's not bad either.
And next week I am away at a conference full of old friends.

Maternal duties

2007-05-30T18:20:00.000+01:00

When you have a child, you think the hard part will be pregnancy, or childbirth; you can even imagine that all the breastfeeding and diaper-changing might be a bit too mcuh, occasionally.
What nobody prepares you for is the later disgusting work. This morning, I spent two hours listening to about 100 children, age 4 to 6, singing and dancing. Two of them were mine, but most of the time I couldn't actually see them; i never could here them, of course.

Last year I didn't show up for the end of the year party, since I was in California; unfortunately, WS didn't understand that he should have gone. The twins were totally unhappy about being the only children whose parents were absent. So this year I did show up, put on feminine (drag?) clothing, and even prepared with my loving hands a large number of ham sandwiches.

Luckily another mother (with a PhD in condensed matter physics!) had taken a day off, so she collected a large number of children and drove away with them. So I was able to work a bit in the afternoon, but I wasn't very productive. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. The paper with PD#1 and S#6 is still very far from final form, and it's urgent.

The sun shines through

2007-05-29T17:24:00.000+01:00

This is first of all true in the direct sense. It is even more true in the metaphorical sense. I did manage to discuss my complaints with someone who might be able to fix them, at least in part. I have also taken some decisions, such as that if an internet discussion systems is not set up soon, I will set it up myself (on livejournal or blogger or wherever). I will just invite everyone and ask the students to help me manage it.

I spent some time talking to S#7 about her thesis, but I wasn't very helpful. then I had a skype discussion with a prospective coauthor who is currently in a different time zone. It was really cool to see each other - webcams are good.

And now, before I go home, I will go and discuss the paper with S#6 and PD#1.

Some parts of my job I really hate

2007-05-29T10:21:00.000+01:00

I spent one hour with WS discussing the precise formulation of the acknowledgements in the paper, since we want to give everybody who helped us their due, but at the same time keep our merits. I then spent another hour with PD#1 and S#6 getting suggestion for a graduate school that I will possibly be giving next year and planning ahead a longer activity for the summer of 2009.
And now I have to go to an administrative meeting, which will be complete waste of time, but if I don't show up my already slim chances of getting a hire in my field will vanish utterly.

Real life commitments

2007-05-28T18:04:00.001+01:00

I spent one week working on a book. A book of which I am supposedly a coauthor, that is. It should take, in my expectations, about one year to finish, if I can commit to it. I had the relevant coauthor, NeCo, visiting. He's a really nice person, only very very nervous. We made a lot of progress, plus now he set-up my internet connection at home.

I also gave to lectures at a nearby university, which was fun; attended a one day meeting with a lot of people I know well but hadn't seen in a long time, which was even more fun. And now, the planning for the summer is almost complete.. no wonder I didn't have time to update the blog.

On a different topic, the paper with WS got a bit delayed, but it should be up and running any minute now.

Back home

2007-05-15T09:31:00.000+01:00

I wouldn't have thought that it would take me 16 hours to go home, but life is full of surprises. It's great to be with the children again. I miss them in some kind of animal way, so that when we see each other more than talking we spend a lot of time just touching each other - a typical scenario is for me to sit down with C#3 on my lap, C#2 on my shoulders, and C#1 sitting nearby while we take turn scratching each other's back.

Monday I spent most of the time talking to students, with some of them finally making progress. WS and I also put the final touch to our joint paper and sent it off to a number of selected colleagues for a preliminary opinion, before posting it on the web.
PD#1 is interviewing; when he comes back I think our joint work will get in final form.

Tuesday was again busy (S#4, PD#2) and choosing PD#3. The applicants were really good, to bad we have only one grant and not five or six. This morning, students again. I now chased S#9 out so that I can go to lunch.

It's not an end, it's a beginning

2007-05-11T18:36:00.000+01:00

My stay at this research institute is coming to its end. Having a month with nothing to worry about but mathematics was an incredible boost: my paper with WS is essentially ready, and in my opinion much better than it was a month ago; my paper with PD#1 and S#6 is also morally ready, in that all significant ideas are now at our fingertips, and I expect it to go online by the end of the month; and despite occasional friction, I did learn a lot about the new subject that UnCo finds so interesting.

Still, I'm happy at the idea of going back to my family. I don't miss them much at the beginning (in fact, the feeling of freedom from responsibility is almost intoxicating) but as the days, and in this case the weeks, go by, I really want to be home.

Today I had so many last-minute preparations to do that I decided to skip a talk this afternoon - it was anyway more of a social event than a scientific one. I am essentially packed now, and tomorrow at this time I will be home.

Working again

2007-05-10T16:55:00.000+01:00

This morning we had to talks, which were both extremely interesting for me. The first is directly in the field I want since a couple of years to start working in, and which is the specialty of PD#2. I heard a talk by one of the experts, which however appears to have missed a key development (=no serious concurrence). I also heard the comment of another expert, who on the other hand seems to be even more of a let's-go-abstract-and-general person than UnCo, and hence again is not likely to duplicate anything I do. Well, well.

The second talk was in my usual research field; I personally know all the four authors, and have actually been staying with two of them at some point in the past. It felt very satisfactory to sit through a talk, understand everything, guess how the argument was going to go on, and even be able to suggest an improvement in presentation. It is also an important result, and now I have understood the idea of the proof and feel confident that I can produce a similar result if need be.

This afternoon I worked again on the supposedly finished paper with WS. In the end we decided to add some stuff to the last chapter, so that it is set-up as general as is natural, and we can go on from there. Technically, we have to pass from schemes to DM stacks, and while the extension is morally obvious, there are a number of delicate technical details that have to be taken care of. But still, it's a joy to write.

UnCo is still feeling sick; he stayed home the whole day yesterday, and today showed up at noon thinking that the talks would be in the afternoon, as they usually are, and discovered to his dismay that he had actually missed both of them. I can now hear him laughing, so I suspect that while he's supposed to finish editing our paper, he's actually reading some funny website.

Slacking

2007-05-09T21:30:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I spent three hours explaining some results of mine and UnCo to anothe visiting professor here. Funnily enough, it was precisely the same stuff UnCo had explained last thursday. At least I'm not the only one who finds it hard to figure out what he's talking about. In the afternoon I sat through another talk of UnCo, which was really bad. Apparently he had been feeling very sick and didn't prepare at all. The secondo talk was really great, though.

This morning I overslept, and spent most of my afternoon trying to concentrate; when I noticed it wasn't working, I did a little of overdue email work. And not even a lot of that.

Two noteworthy links (yes, I did spend time idling online). One is about high-heeled shoes, and why they are bad for your feet. As if this wasn't obvious to everyone who had had the occasion to try them on. The otheris a fantastic technical description about what the so-called partial birth abortion is good for. Not to kill a beautiful, healthy fetus who has the bad luck to sit in the belly of a heartless woman, but to give a woman who carries a doomed, or possibly dead, fetus, and who may or may not have serious health problems herself, to give end the pregnancy with the least possible damage to her own body. The idea that the only reasonable alternative is to dismember the fetus, so that the mother can't possibly hold it afterwards, is really appalling me.

Mother's day is approaching

2007-05-07T20:17:00.000+01:00

I am laughing alone in front of my computer. I just found The Onion's Mother's Day edition. After careful perusal, I think my favorite is the women's history timeline, especially the last point. It reminds me that I need to schedule a Pap test soon.

WS sent back the final version of the paper with a few changes. It still needs some very minor fixing, but it's really, really done. Wow.

I spent most of the day working on the project with UnCo, partially with him but mostly on my own. We did make some progress, not unrelated to my valiant effort to keep everything I know in a nicely readable file. UnCo is really smart, but occasionally the combination of "Don't bother to check that, I did that already" and "No, it appears I can't find the correct sheet of paper" can go on my nerves.

I also did non-research work, discussing whether a certain paper should at all be considered for a prestigious journal, and wrote a recommendation letter for a brilliant woman who's trying to get her first tenure position (with the almost usual two-body problem).

Before lunch I had the occasion to talk with the director of the research institute where I am visiting. I politely inquired why there was no information on their website about schools/Kindergartens/daycare centers in the area, to help parents planning a trip (this place usually ships the first invitation to a program three years ahead - I got mine with more than a year to spare). He answered courteously that they had considered it, but it was all so complicated that they decided to forget about it.

I asked whether he was aware that in this way the institute de facto discriminates against women scientists, since they are much more likely then men not to have a stay-at-home spouse who could invest a lot of time in searching stuff on the internet. I pointed out that adding a few links to the website of schools in the area and/or schools that offer bilingual programs didn't seem to require much effort. He said that he was sorry but after serious consideration they had decided that it was so much of a hassle to deal with kids that it really wasn't worth the secretary's time.

I am just wondering whether I should send a letter about this to him, and cc all the private organization which fund this place. With a link to Princeton, maybe. Where after all they do take women seriously.

Dinner conversation

2007-05-06T18:06:00.000+01:00

The main argument of yesterday's conversation seems to me worth of a separate post, if nothing else because I think it was some remark of mine on this topic that induced the two senior colleagues in question to invite me to join them for dinner.

Mathematics is in one significant respect very different from most other scientific subjects: namely, most of the research done in the past decades is still correct and applicable. However, mathematical fashion changes, and the language of mathematics moves on: so, in time a natural selection occurs, and results that are perceived as important get incorporated in standard reference books, and the rest gets forgotten and sleeps in many a library shelf. In particular, history tends to be obliterated, and young people know definitions and theorems without knowing who first introduced or proved them.

However, in the period 1960-1970 my field had an incredible change of pace; tons of new ideas where introduced at a speed that most researchers of the time, not to mention a publishing system based on typewriters, had big problems keeping pace with. I am not a historian of science, but my impression at 40 years of distance was that the key point in this gargantuan enterprise was one person: Alexander Grothendieck. His ideas have changed the face of algebraic geometry as we know it, and lie at the base of many current famous results, most notably Fermat's last theorem.

My comment was that a large part of the work done in those years seems to have been forgotten and not passed on to the younger generations as it should have. I started thinking about this when Faltings, at the beginning of a course on algebraic stacks, explained that stacks were as important as schemes, but the generation that had had to digest schemes had refused to deal with stacks as well. In the same weeks, I was working my way through as much as I could understand (i.e., not much) of Grothendieck's mathematical testament, Récoltes et Semailles. There he expresses precisely the same viewpoint, namely that a lot of his work has been factually hidden from the eyes of the average working mathematician.

Whether this is due to someone's agenda (Grothendieck makes quite a few high-level names, which has made Récoltes et Semailles unpublishable) or it just happened, it is definitely time to go back, and retrace our steps. An impressive result in this direction is the re-edition of SGA1 and SGA 2 by the Société Mathématique de France; it is a LaTeX typeset and corrected version of some fundamental, typewritten notes from the early sixties, the kind of thing that an old enough library would have, but was difficult to get for private use. Now it is affordable to everyone (especially members of the SMF).

What I think is very significant is the way the typesetting was done: namely, a number of mathematicians from all over the world volunteered hours and hours of work to input, and correct the .tex file. It is, literally speaking, a labour of love.

My point yesterday was that we need more of this, both in the sense of re-editing (and making available in electronic form) old books, and also in the sense of translating the old books in modern mathematical language, so that everybody can read them. We should use the possibilities of the new media to produce a document which is readable at different levels; a short one for the experts, but one where one can just click on an unfamiliar name to read its definition, and on a step of the proof to find a more detailed version, including the details known to the experts.

And most of this has to be labor of love; but if we want it to happen, we have to start giving at least some credit to people who do the work. I am thinking of all the mathematicians who already are tenured, and who therefore are not any more under desperate pressure to publish. It shouldn't look like a hole in the cv if in one given year you have no paper but a beautiful edition/exposition of old, inaccessible stuff.

Let me finish with a beautiful sentence I heard at lunch not very many days ago by a colleague who is a bit older than me: "I could of course keep writing paper after paper. But there is so much beautiful mathematics out there that I don't know yet, and I want to read at least some of it before I die". Me too.

Paper finished!

2007-05-06T16:21:00.000+01:00

First, the big news: in the afternoon I fixed the paper with WS! It is now essentially ready, and we might start to informally circulate it next week. Our first joint paper after the twins... how romantic. We definitely should dedicate it to them, as we did for the corresponding paper after the birth of C#1. Feel free to imagine me dancing, shouting, and drinking (the drinking part hasn't yet become reality, but I'll work on it later in the day).

Yesterday I had dinner with two much older colleagues. In fact, each of them is old enough to be my father. It was a very pleasant dinner, with a lot of historical and philosophical discussions. I hope I will stay as smart as I grow old. It also gave me back the feeling of being a young girl, which I had otherwise lost long ago.

This morning I didn't do maths. First I cleaned up my flat: I am by nature a total slob, but it was so dirty it started to bother me. As a reward for doing a good deed, I did see a hare from a very short distance. The last time I saw a hare was here, on my previous visit. I haven't seen any hare otherwise in my life.

Between yesterday and lunchtime I finished reading the four books I started three days ago: two lent by UnCo, and two bought by me in the local language, which I can read although not speak. It was really great. I love reading, and if books were alcohol I would have become a member of AA before I turned 5. Plus, the two books in the local language I'll read again and again, so that I can learn more words and expressions. The woman at the local bookstore gave me really good advice.

And then I cleared up for UnCo a misconception he had about an exact sequence. Tensor products are nasty things, and the notation we use is ambiguous and potentially confusing. Actually, it is standard since about four decades, so I think the correct viewpoint is that it's UnCo that gets easily confused, but I didn't tell him that.

How I learned algebraic topology

2007-05-05T11:53:00.000+01:00

Some people can learn out of books. This is actually a good option if you want to learn algebraic topology nowadays; there's plenty of good books, some even in my native language, and some can be downloaded for free (legally!).
But I'm not good at studying on my own, so I took a course in my second undergraduate year. The course was attended by a grand total of two students, and none of my friends took it. It turned out to be a fabulous course. The professor, undaunted by the paucity of the audience, gave a series of beautiful lectures, covered a lot of material some of which wasn't even published yet, and gave us a huge amount of handwritten notes to support the reference textbooks.

Algebraic topology is a strange beast. In a sense, it is extremely intuitive: it gives precise meaning to statements like "a donut has one hole, but a pretzel has three" and allows you to generalize such statements to objects you can't visualize at all. However, when you seriously want to study it, you discover you need a lot of technical tools, and it's easy to loose the intuitive aspects. The handwritten notes we were given were largely hand drawn; it's thanks to them that I kept my intuition alive all that year, and a combination of that and of differential topology has become a substantial part of the subtly warped bag of mathematical tools that allow me sometimes to see more, or differently, than many more talented and informed colleagues.

Most of all, I was fascinated by the professor herself. She kept her hair short, clean but untidy, wore baggy jeans and a poncho, and didn't try to hide either the first few gray hair or a reasonably substantial moustache. She was tall, strong, loud, and wore thick nonfashionable glasses. She brought to the course an incredible enthousiasm, and brought us so far that we each decided to read a piece of more advanced stuff on our own instead of the usual question-and-answers exam. In my case, I studied a whole book. I didn't understand it very well, and the professor was not terribly impressed. She still gave me a top mark, although when she saw that I had top marks in all the mathematics exams, she jokingly regretted having done so.

The following summer, I sat down with a helpful, older student to figure out whom I should choose as thesis advisor. I knew: I wanted her, the woman who looked like me, the person who could bring homological algebra to life. Plus, she was working on an exciting project for a concrete description of something exotic called cohomology. But my friend discouraged me: he said that I should choose instead my future advisor, who was a rising star in a field which is popular in my country, while algebraic topology professors are few and far apart. Plus, he added, the professor I so liked had been promoted and was leaving anyway.

The advice was completely correct. My advisor and I have been a fantastic match, and the algebraic topology professor left mathematical research for didactic of mathematics; she also never came back to my alma mater, and I have seen her once only since, about ten years ago. As for the situation in my country, in each of the three universities where I have worked so far I have been the algebraic topology reference person, based on that one lonely course so many years ago, because most people didn't even know as much.

Besides teaching me a fantastic amount of mathematics, she taught me that I didn't have to look like my mother told me all women should look like; that I could choose to wear comfortable rational clothes, and derive intense pleasure from a job where nobody cared how I looked like. Even more importantly, she taught me that it is not important how many people are listening to you: what counts is that you always do your best.

I didn't understand all of this immediately, and I would certainly not have been able to put it into words at the time. I kept wearing makeup, and skirts, and uncomfortable shoes. But the she has helped me become the myself that I am today. And my first paper with WS has two main theorems, and not one, because I knew enough hands-on algebraic topology (who knows, maybe it even helped me impress WS?).

I wouldn't say my Algebraic Topology professor ever felt like a mother to me. She actually didn't look motherly at all, despite a very feminine body that the poncho disguised but became pretty obvious with the arrival of summer. But when I read that next month's scientiae-carnival topic is mothers and others, women who have influenced us along the way, I immediately thought of her.

Last Thursday

2007-05-05T10:21:00.000+01:00

Last Thursday was a really good day mathematically. We had three talks. The first one was in the morning, by UnCo, about work which is partially joint with me. UnCo showed up late (saying that he's not a morning person is a vigorous understatement) and went 15 minutes overtime, but he gave a really great talk. I'm lucky at being able to learn from him.
The second one I gave, about joint work with PD#1 and S#7. The first afternoon talk is always a problem, since part of the audience (particularly mature, portly gentlemen) has a tendency to nap. Still, it was well received and got pleasant and useful feedback.
The third was by my student, and that led to a question by one of the mature portly gentlemen who, no doubt refreshed by the previous nap, alerted me to a very important 40-years old reference I had missed.

To cap the day, UnCo and I went for a pleasant long walk, had dinner together, and talked about Gott und die Welt until midnight, while finishing a well-deserved bottle of French wine. There are days when I really love my job.

A room of one's own

2007-05-02T10:08:00.000+01:00

I don't easily cry. In particular, I never cry at movies, and I almost never cry at books. There is one conspicuous exception to this, though. When I arrive at this sentence in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own I always feel my eyes getting moist:

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me—and there are thousands like me—you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science.

I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't in the selection from the book published in the Guardian today. For those who haven't read it yet, do read it. Not that sentence only, which is much lamer out of context, and not the Guardian's selection, but the whole book.

Like the Guardian editors, I find it impressive how modern Woolf's feminist essays have stayed, even after a century of such big changes in the relationship among the sexes. I will reserve a list of detailed comparisons between Three Guineas and the department I work in for a later rant.

Laboring Day

2007-05-01T22:50:00.000+01:00

I celebrated Labor Day by working very hard the whole day. I met my student S#4 this morning, than I worked on the joint project with PD#1 and S#6, and
then I spent the afternoon discussing PDE's with UnCo. Turns out he couldn't solve a system of them because he was looking for a polynomial solution and the answer was an exponential function.

I cooked myself a decent dinner, and after another short chat with UnCo I watched a very good Kaurismaki movie, about a man who has forgotten his name and everything else. I like Kaurismaki, but this was the first time I saw a movie of his in the original finnish language. I am proud to say that I had no trouble reading the swedish subtitles.

C#3 is fine and healthy, it appears. So all is well that ends well. And tomorrow I will work hard again.

News from the homefront

2007-05-01T08:07:00.000+01:00

By choosing this month to be away, I cleverly skipped being at home during a 4-day school vacation, caused by May 1st being a Tuesday. Yesterday morning WS called to say that C#3 had a fever. Apparently he has a cough, didn't sleep well in the night, and in the morning was very hot and very sluggish. What should he do, asked WS?
Of course the answer is easy: nothing. Just wait and see, unless the fever rises. After lunch the fever was gotten a bit higher, so C#3 got some paracetamol. Thirty minutes later, the fever was gone. He played all afternoon, and around dinner time announced that he would like some sausages. I haven't yet heard from them this morning, but if that was the end of the illness, WS is really lucky.

La notte porta consiglio

2007-05-01T07:58:00.000+01:00

Roughly translated: sleeping over your problems helps you find a solution. Yesterday I sent to my young coauthors PD#1 and S#7 a severely revised version of our joint work. In the afternoon we had a joint skype phone call about it, and PD#1 made a few very good points about the exposition. And this morning I finally figured out what he meant, and also what we have to do so that the paper becomes more readable. Unfortunately, it involves a substantial amount of rewriting.

Yesterday I also decided that if I want to be any use in my current collaboration with UnCo, I will seriously learn to need some of the background material. Unfortunately, the relevant book is not in the library here, and even if I were to buy it immediately it might take at least one week and possibly much more until I get it. So I decided to buy it, have it shipped to my home address, and in the meantime I xeroxed the first few pages. I also decided to buy myself a new notebook and a couple of pretty pens to take notes with, but today being May 1st I will have to wait until tomorrow for that. I like the idea of going back to being a student; after all, that's something I can do much better than being a professor, and I had only such a short time of it.

Yesterday I also spent one hour with S#4 discussing his thesis project, and we have another appointment today. He certainly works hard, but is still proceeding very, very slowly. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for him.

Dream job?

2007-04-30T18:46:00.000+01:00

Today I did something I haven't done in a very, very long time. I updated my cv and applied for a job. WS has done the same - it turns out they are advertising 5 jobs at the same time, at a top research university, in our favorite country. Unfortunately, our chances of getting two offers are virtually zero. It is a country where I know very few female professors, even less married ones, and none with more than one child. They have absolutely no plan for hiring couples; in fact, the expectation is that a wannabe professor should be free to move from one side to the other, and the way taxes work means that if the professor's spouse stays at home the professor's income receives a bog boost.
Of course despite the law being framed in completely gender neutral terms, the not surprising upshot is that women professors are few, far between, and childless.
Looking at my cv I was less than impressed. You can almost recognize my children's faces in the big, gaping holes: in the publications list, but also in the participation to conferences, periods of study aborad, etcetera. Now I have started being productive again, although as usual it takes longer than I thought. Yesterday I worked the whole day, so hard that I got a backache. Today I took it a bit easier. I have also decided to study a new topic, like if I were a student, from scratch. So now I'm going to switch off the computer, and go buy a new notebook and a few coloured pens: I was able to learn new stuff at 18, so I will just do what I did then, and hope it works.

Healthy relationship with advisor

2007-04-28T19:48:00.000+01:00

I laughed so hard when reading this PhD Comicstrip. I score 4, and I can't imagine how I forgot the name of my advisors' advisor (actually, I am uncertain between two). It might help that the answer to questions 1 and 2 is the same for my advisor and me.
Even sadder, I think most of my students score 4 on me. But the answer to question 5 is really secret.

Does anyone remember how women got the right to vote?

2007-04-27T10:49:00.000+01:00

This almost brought tears to my eyes. Especially since the vote to women in my country was granted after my own mother was born. And I'm pretty sure we didn't learn almost anything about the suffrage question at school, especially not that it involved violence, and special leigslation, and it took so damn long.

Are wet nurses really back?

2007-04-27T10:23:00.000+01:00

So now everybody's discussing whether it's moral/sanitary/yucky to have a woman other than the mother breastfeed a baby. As someone who has personally breastfed her own babies (no outsourcing here!) I have a pretty clear opinion about this.

I don't find it yucky, either in the for-pay or in the for-free version. It has been done for centuries. In an ideal world, all mothers would be able to nurse their own kids all the time, but there are many reasons why this is not the case and outside help is required. I find somebody else's breast milk less yucky than formula.

The sanitary reasons seem bogus. Most women don't have any condition that can be transmitted via breast milk, and most of those who do either know that or can easily find it out: for instance, in my country every pregnant woman is routinely HIV-screened, and a woman who hasn't been pregnant can't breastfeed.

Also, I think a lot of what we hear about having kids grow up in a sterile environment seems grossly exaggerated. Newborns, especially preemies or kids who already have health problems, must of course be sheltered, and for them a milk bank offering pasteurized breast milk seems a very good option; but elder kids aren't that delicate.

At age 7 months my daughter would happily crawl on all fours on the playground, where older kids were or had been running together with their parents; when she was tired, she would sit up and suck her unwashed thumb. She didn't get any disease at all. And she kept being nursed for many months after that; I don't see how sucking another (averagely healthy) woman's breast would have been worse for her.

To this must be added that I loved breastfeeding, and never had problems with it. Had I been born a few centuries earlier than I was, I would have been a partial invalid due to my poor eyesight. Also I am not good at most physical work, which is what my (largely illiterate) ancestors did until the generation before mine. But there is one job that I could have done with pleasure and success: the wet nurse!

Household duties and mathematical life

2007-04-26T21:28:00.000+01:00

Here I try to focus on my work as a mathematician, but of course I also have the duties of every normal human being. In particular, today I spent quite a lot of time doing my laundry with an unfamiliar machine, and even more drying it with very mysterious objects (a real waste on a dry and sunny day).

As part of my lesser duties to the mathematical life, I went to lunch with a group of colleagues, and attended a really good talk by a young member of the Institute I'm visiting.
I have a long-standing prejudice that dutch mathematicians are trained to become really, really good lecturer: it goes back 20 years now, and the counterexamples (if any) are few and far apart. Today's talk confirmed the prejudice: it was very clear, extremely well organized, and managed to finish quite on time.

I received a sad email telling me that one of the top two applicants for our forthcoming postdoctoral position has accepted a (much better) offer somewhere else. I must admit not being too surprised, since I thought he was way too good for us; still, I hope the other outstanding candidate doesn't vanish the same way.

I have started studying a very beautiful book that a colleague has lent me: unfortunately, the library here doesn't have it, and as usual buying it will take at least two weeks. Of course had I been staying in the US I would have gotten it tomorrow (and cheaper too). It is part of the work for the project with UCo, and might help me understand what is really going on. At least I'm learning a beautiful piece of mathematics, something that a research scientist rarely has time to do (that might actually be a good topic for a detailed rant one of these days).

I also did write a couple more pages for the paper with WS, which hopefully is really going to be ready any day now.

WS and I are also discussing a much more serious issue, namely if we want to stay where we are or try to move to a different country. We both agree that in the country we are now we are in an optimal situation, but the question is whether somewhere else we could live better. Of course I am scared as hell at the thought of moving a whole family, have the kids get used to a new town/school/language etc, learning to fight with a different burocracy, and in general moving to a country with a lower precentage of female mathematicians (basically any move will have that effect).

On the other hand, as professors it is hard to move once you are 50+, and WS, despite looking like a teenager and for some things reasoning like an 8-year old, is not that terribly far away from the half-century mark. So if we want to go it better be soon, and whatever move we make is very likely going to be the last one. It is kind of comforting that I am not the only Female Science Professor entertaining similar thoughts of moving as a mid-career academic couple.

Working together

2007-04-25T18:29:00.000+01:00

Many mathematicians prefer not to work alone. It is basically for the same reason why people who go mountain climbing don't go alone; having somebody nearby, as you explore an unknown and difficult territory, can help you avoid pitfalls and desaster, or find a brilliant shortcut. Plus, in the occasional breaks from intense thinking that must occur to preserve mental sanity, you have someone around to chat with.

I usually prefer to choose my coworkers among people I am close to anyway. In fact, I wrote my first joint paper with WS, who at that time was just a Wonderful Boyfriend. The next joint paper was written with FCo, my (so far only) female coauthor, a close friend who had been a student with me, on a topic which was very close to both our theses. I am very proud of that work, because it is the first of my papers where I didn't just prove the theorems but significantly contributed to the statements. All my papers so far had been suggestions of my advisor, except for the joint work with WS which was based on an idea of WS.

You may guess the next logical step: I wrote a paper with Ununderstandable Coauthor UnCo, a close friend of WS who had been a student with him. With time, I think that UnCo and I have also become friends. I am not sure because I still find him quite ununderstable, though.

A the same time, I started a collaboration with another friend who was had been a student with me: I'll refer to him as ImCo, for impressive coauthor, since when he applied for a job at the university where I was working, a colleague told me how he had been so impressed by this particular candidate. Except he used a word in my language which is much stronger than impressive, and which made everybody laugh. For the record, ImCo did turn down our offer, and has since only worked in Impressive Universities.

Excluding PD's and S's, my youngest coauthor is NeCo, my nervous coauthor. He's an extremely smart person who tends to worry overmuch about any mistake he might possibly make. When he's not talking about himself, which tends to be a very gloomy topic, he's a very pleasant person to spend time with; he also drinks precisely the correct amount so that, when having dinner together, we can order haf a liter of wine. NeCo works in a different country, but not too far away, so hopefully we'll see a lot of each other in the future.

I'll keep updating this page, so as to have all the coauthors together.

Working on a holiday

2007-04-25T18:15:00.000+01:00

Today is a holiday in the country I usually live in, but not where I am now. I got up late. I'm ashamed how late it was... but it's all the fault of being at the Opera yesterday evening - and that is of course Good For My Culture, right? - and not at all to do with the time spent in a Tapas bar afterwards.

I spent half an hour talking to S#7, cleverly avoided S#4, and devoted the whole afternoon to working with my coauthor who's here, whom I'll refer to as my Ununderstandable Coauthor (UCo). UCo is also the one who thought of going to the Tapas bar to begin with, so it's all his fault (it's always somebody else's fault). UCo and I are working on a paper which needs methods from a field we are not at all familiar with. So we get all the hardship of learning from scratch something new, without the help of an advisor or of anybody else, and while having "grownup" pressure to publish. Plus, of course, not only white hair abound on both of our heads, but also the inside of said heads isn't as smart as when we were students in the last century.
So it's all pretty hard, and there's always a very nontrivial risk that whatever we end up producing, if nonempty, will be declared unreadable by people who work in our field and trivial by people in the new field.

Tomorrow morning I will have to get up early to do my laundry, and then I have scheduled a Skype chat with PD#1 and S#7 to discuss our joint work. The next few days are going to be really intense.

Slowmotion progress

2007-04-24T15:42:00.000+01:00

I didn't work too hard sunday and yesterday. I did, however, finish my part of the paper with WS, and started seriously working on the paper with PD#1 and S#6. It turns out that PD#1 and S#6 are so worried about getting the mathematics right that the paper is coming out very unattractive, which is bad because people will not read it. The fact that they both see very well, and so chose a ten-point style with very narrow margins, also doesn't help in making the paper reader-friendly. So now I'm in the middle of a major meditation on how to write this all up nicely.

Today I also spent two hours and a half explaining a postdoc and a doctoral student here a more geometric version of a classical construction. Classical means more than 30 years old, but it still is not written in any textbook, and so young people find it hard to read. It turns out that I never read the old paper, and reconstructed the proof myself - ending up with a much simpler approach, which is no doubt familar to all the experts, but is not written down anywhere. So now hopefully these two young people (who are obviously a couple) will write it all up nicely.

I am happy for them and pleased to be of help, but I'm wondering what kind of field I'm in where it takes thirty years until key ideas get finally a reasonable expository form.

In related news, I spent one hour on the phone with WS and one with S#6 discussing the respective papers. Even in these very modern times, not everything can be done via email. Hopefully soon we will all have a webcam, and then we can collaborate wherever we are.

Now I have to hurry up and have a snack and a short walk, as I'm going to the opera tonight. Of course I have nothing really elegant to put on, but after all this is northern europe so I don't have to. Hopefully.

Under the blanket of ugliness

2007-04-21T19:16:00.000+01:00

Yesterday evening, as I went to buy groceries for dinner, I had a sudden intuition: it could happen that one of my students has a crush on me! After one minute of further deliberation, I decided that it's most likely not the case, and if it were, my best strategy is to ignore it and just make sure our relationship doesn't become too friendly.
But I kept wondering why it took me so many years of advising to realize that some such thing might at all be possible. The answer, of course, is that I am (by current standards) ugly, and have been so ever since I hit puberty. So I am used to the fact that usually people, and especially men, see me in a unsexual way.
And this has been good for me in many ways. I think I have been bothered much less than better-looking women, and in fact almost not at all.
I got used to the fact that whomever I was attracted to was most likely not attracted to me, and learned to live with it without suffering - surely a very useful lesson, especially if learned early in life.
Any human being who was ever attracted to me (a very small set anyway) was usually at least partially enthralled by my intellectual abilities, something which is by nature a bit more longlasting then physical beauty.
And very importantly for me as a scientist, male colleagues were not so tempted to discuss my looks instead of my theorems. I remember overhearing a comment "I don't know what she talked about, I was looking lower than the blackboard" after a talk by a good-looking woman wearing some ever so slightly tight-fitting trousers. This is unlikely to happen to me - and since then I always make sure to show up at conferences wearing non-revealing clothing to be on the safe side.
Ugliness has been a shelter for me, a bit like Harry Potter's invisibility blanket. As a teenager, I was very unhappy with it, but now I regard it as a blessing. I think for a really beautiful woman it is harder to be taken seriously as a mathematician.
I also have started to really like my looks. When I have time, I buy clothes with pleasure, and I appreciate the fact that I want first and foremost to look good to myself. It is also easier to make a few adjustments to accommodate the few preferences of WS: for instance, not cutting my hair really short, and wearing warm instead of cold and/or dark colours. It is much less effort than trying to keep up with a forever changing fashion and our society's unreasonable demands on women (uncomfortable clothing and shoes and unpleasant body hair removal spring first to mind, but do not exhaust the list).
Now I just have to find the time to get a haircut and buy clothes. Maybe next week.

Working with my husband

2007-04-21T19:08:00.000+01:00

Today, and the whole week, I found it very hard to seriously concentrate. At least I did manage for a couple of hours, and now the article with WS seems to be approaching completion. It is not that great, but it's ok. I did check one of his most badly written proofs, which had been bouncing between right and wrong in the past, and it is right. Just appallingly badly written. How he finds it natural to write something which mixes rigour with gut feeling and ends up being a proof is beyond me.

Plus, I have to accept the way he wants to write part of the paper. I discussed it yesterday over dinner with a friend, and he said that he understood my objections and asked why I didn't try to discuss with WS a change of notation. My answer was that 1) he's actually the expert in this area, so maybe the notation, although crazy, is indeed standard and 2) many women love their husbands so much that they accept infidelity, drunkenness, and marital violence. If all I have to face is the fact that a few brackets become subscripts, it really seems a minor sacrifice.

Daycare im Spiegel

2007-04-21T13:26:00.000+01:00

Today two articles with essentially the same content: Danemark' princess gets criticized for sending her 17-month old child to daycare, and Stoiber (hasn't the loser retired already?) suggests that money should be spent on keeping mothers at home and not on daycare.

Apparently there's too many people, even in those lucky countries on the other side of the Alps with respect to the Vatican, who think that all children under three should be at home. Despite the fact that no studies show that this is better for the child (of course what is better for the mother is not taken into consideration at all).

And here in the deep north, where there are hopefully no such problems, it is really, really cold.

Partial Birth Abortion: an outing

2007-04-20T13:21:00.000+01:00

As many already know, the US supreme Court has upheld a federal ban of partial birth abortion.

The first time I read a description of this procedure, I was myself disgusted, and thought it should be forbidden. The article said that it was a procedure to call abortion and make legal the killing of a perfectly viable, term fetus, by extracting the body and then sucking out the brain before collapsing and extracting the skull. It does sound really bad. I couldn't imagine why any woman would want that.

I have since learned that it is a medical procedure performed when an abortion is necessary at an advanced pregnancy stage, usually because of a mother's health problem or a very sick, and sometimes already dead, fetus. The idea is that an abortion has already been ok'ed anyway, and that this particular procedure is preferred over a "natural" vaginal delivery or a cesarean because it presents less risks' for the mothers' health, particularly her ability to bear other children in the future. A typical indication are severe hydrocefalus cases, where any from of abortion that doesn't involve collapsing the skull is much more dangerous for the mothers' body.

I think that when more than one medical procedure is possible to treat a disease, mentally healthy human beings should be given an informed choice on what should be done to their body. I think money considerations should not play a role, as much as humanly possible.

I am appalled to think that in this case five men, none of whom has ever risked being pregnant with a very sick or dead fetus, much less had a direct experience of it, have decided that women who face such difficult situations will have one less choice. How many precisely will be impacted is too early to say.

I will never be in such a situation: my childbearing days are over, and I'm not in the US anyway. But my daughter? Who will take care of my daughter, and of my granddaughters, and of the generations to come? I'm scared, scared of going back to the Middle Ages. What if the Winter of Reason comes back, and engulfs the world?

Postdoc: luck and and the rest

2007-04-19T09:56:00.000+01:00

This post is submitted to the fourth Postdoc Carnival, at least if I can get the postdoc carnival Technorati tag to work.

Due to some quirks of my country's hiring system, I never was a postdoc myself. There never was a postdoctoral fellow around when I was a student, or an assistant professor. So it was with some trepidation that, some years ago, I selected "my" first postdoc. I had no clue what I was supposed to do to help him, and even less as to whether he could help me. I just knew I had volunteered to help him making the big step from student to research scientist, and was quite scared.

PD#1 started to help me by asking clever questions during my lectures, and discussing with me afterwards what I might do to improve them. He had many informal conversations with students, and gave me useful feedback (he even went initiated conversations when he felt a student was in trouble but too shy to ask for help). He helped organising various seminars and study groups, and more mundane events as well: wine and cheese party, dinner out together.

As he became technically more proficient in my expertise area, which was due to his hard work but also to my help, he started having projects of his own, collaborating with other postdocs which he got in touch with via email or met at conferences: I helped him find money for his travels, and for hospitality at our institute for his collaborators.

Finally, we are now working on a joint research project, which I really like a lot.

Looking back, I feel first of all lucky. I made a difficult choice two years ago, faced with research programs that were hard to understand, and cv's that were impossible to compare. I don't know, and will never know, whether I made the best choice. But my choice was at least good.

I have now learned that a well-turned postdoctoral grant is a win-win-win game, with the profit being equally shared by the grad students, the PI and the postdoctoral fellow. I think this depends more on the goodwill of the people involved than on the actual skill with which the selection was made (on either side). I went through my scientific career choosing people to work with on the basis that they were, or at least seemed to be, nice people. Humans I trusted. It has worked very well, so far.

Goodnight call

2007-04-15T21:33:00.000+01:00

I just had a brief phone call with WS. He went to the beach with the children and a family of friends, and none of them got a sunburn. He was totally exhausted, however, as it had been a lot of work to bathe, feed, and put to bed the kids, and then reorder at least some of the mess. So he was listening less than enthousiastically at my explanations about the changes I made in the draft of our paper and my candidates for the position of Postdoc #3.

Here in the deep north it was a fantastically sunny day. I just have to get my sleeping schedule back to normal: last night I didn't fall asleep until 3am, and this morning I consequently slept until 11. Tomorrow morning I go on a shopping spree, and than I will start to kick mathematical ass.

I might have three papers on the arxiv in the next month. I can't believe it.

I knew it all the time

2007-04-15T13:43:00.000+01:00

Who are the happiest with their studies? If you don't read german, the title says "Happyness, depending on the type of university degree".
I am today a particularly good example: the weather is unbelievably beautiful, I'm putting the finishing touches to a paper which will be ready soon, and I have already made plans for going to the Systembolaget tomorrow.

Back in Paradise

2007-04-13T07:21:00.000+01:00

The sun woke me up this morning. The one-room flat is in the middle of a wood, a few steps away from the big villa where the Institute is. I was here ten years ago, and it seems like yesterday. It's a country where I certainly would like to live, but mathematically one ends up being somewhat isolated, no only for geographical reasons but also because of a heavy teaching load.
The little I know of the language I've kept, but I still find it very hard to understand when spoken. Luckily everyone speaks english here.
Now I just have to hope my suitcase can join me.

On the go

2007-04-12T08:59:00.000+01:00

I came back from Easter vacation yesterday, and I am leaving again for work reasons today. I like travelling, but I sometimes think there is a bit too much of it in my life.

Deep sadness

2007-04-03T10:42:00.000+01:00

Sometimes things are just too sad.
The trial has started for a gynecologist that killed a woman by unprofessionality and neglect. He forced her baby out her womb and wounded her, and he didn't listen to her complaints that she was feeling really sick and losing a lot of blood. When the next doctor arrived, they had an emergency operation, but it was too late.
My midwife told me a few things about it. The doctor was the woman's private doctor. She extra paid for him to be there at delivery: this also means he was very tired, since his turn had just finished. He is well known to always want the birth to go faster than natural, and uses vacuum extraction much more than the other doctors. Plus, the next day there was a big sailing race, and the doctor was participating, so he was in a special hurry to go home and get some rest.
I was also in the hospital those days, in the maternity ward. Nobody told us anything, and it wasn't on the newspaper (my midwife told me after I went home). But I did see the beautiful baby, who never had his mother but a number of very sad looking people around: the father, the grandparents, uncles and aunts.
Most of all, I remember the elder brother, aged maybe 8, trying to hold the baby and feed it formula with a bottle. In my language formula is called artificial milk. At some point the elder brother asked: "Why do we give him artificial milk? Shouldn't he be getting natural milk instead?". Nobody answered that question. There was just a big silence. And then the child understood. He just said "Oh.". Very softly.
I was there, busy with my newborns, excited and happy. But that pause, and the little soft "Oh." really broke my heart, even if I didn't know precisely what had happened. I can't remember it even now without crying.

Marital jealousy

2007-04-03T10:24:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I was late in the office. Mostly I was delaying going home, since I was really sick with a bad cold; I was sitting back in my comfortable armchair with my eyes closed, appreciating the silence.
When I went home, finally, WS was really angry. After some gentle coaxing, he finally admitted that he was jealous because I had spent so many hours working on my paper with PD#1 and S#6, and not on our joint paper. So I sat there with him and we discussed it for an hour, after which he admitted that he couldn't even make a reasonable statement of his proposed generalization of our main theorem.
This morning I spent another hour discussing with WS and I explained to him my proof of the one missing statement in the current project. So now that paper is mathematically finished, and we might manage to write it up in the easter vacation. I might have two papers on the arXiv before the end of april! I can't believe it!

I hate mondays

2007-04-02T17:07:00.000+01:00

Saturday evening C#1's best friend came home with her, and spent the night. Yesterday was hectic, with WS being several hours in his bed, claiming sickness, amd the kids making a horrible mess everywhere. I didn't do any mathematics, and I didn't do any household duties either.
This morning there was a talk by PD#2, and then I spent several hours discussing our joint paper with PD#1 and S#6. It seems that now it's completely settled, and some of the details may very well be left out and become a tiny new article.
I then spent 90 minutes discussing with S#9 his thesis project. It's coming out really well, and he should have a really good paper in a few months. He's only despondent because he's convinced I'm helping him too much. He should see what the others are doing... although, to be fair, he got a really nice problem, and he might really be faster with it. If he wasn't so outrageously young, and the problem so revoltingly technical, that is.
I'm really happy with him.
Now I just have to make sure that, at some point, I can number all the students correctly :-).

Strange weekend

2007-03-31T14:51:00.000+01:00

C#1 went to school on her own yesterday morning (well, half the way), and I haven't seen her again yet. After school she went to a friend's place and stayed overnight. I'll go pick her up soon.

I didn't do any maths yesterday evening, had a good night of sleep, was woken up by C#2 and C#3 at 7am sharp. We went shopping in the morning, and after lunch came to the office: while they watched "Nemo" I managed to answer some email and, more importantly, print and mail 13 recommendation letters for PD#1. I'm sad he's going, and hope he does get a permanent job, which he amply deserves.

On a sadder note, I heard from a perspective candidate for our position as PD#3: he can't apply because of a stupid age limit. We should just cancel those.

When I woke up this morning I had another insight on how to simplify a definition (and subsequent proofs) which was kind of worrying me. I managed to do the few relevant calculations this morning while C#2 and C#3 were preparing a drawing for WS. He'll be back this evening. I can't wait.

.. and in the day, too!

2007-03-30T14:31:00.000+01:00

I had lunch with PD#1, who gave me a lot of really good suggestions on how to organize next year's courses and exams. He has spent a lot of time talking to our students, and gave me valuable feedback. We also planned the schedule for our joint work in the next few weeks.
Then I filled in some forms on an official website, and I spent one hour discussing with our secretary some long needed changes in our postdoctoral grants' announcement and application form. I might even participate in the relevant council meeting, as "expert"!
And now it's time to write some proofs. I might have three new papers in arXiv before summer, after all.