Love thy colleague

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!

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

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

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:

1. an expository article on a topic I know very well, but from an angle I am not familiar with;
2. a short autobiography for a site about careers of women in science;
3. a short article on the relation between women and science for a magazine with a mostly medical audience;
4. another expository article on a topic I know very well, but which completely lacks readable references;
5. a short expository article on part of my recent work;
6. a short expository article about what I hope will become my future area of research;
7. 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

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

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

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.