mathbabe

I’m putting the finishing touches on my third talk of the week, which is called “How math is used outside academia” and is intended for a math audience at the AGNES conference.

I’m taking Amtrak up to Providence to deliver the talk at Brown this afternoon. After the talk there’s a break, another talk, and then we all go to the conference dinner and I get to hang with my math nerd peeps. I’m talking about you, Ben Bakker.

Since I’m going straight from a data conference to a math conference, I’ll just make a few sociological observations about the differences I expect to see.

• No name tags at AGNES. Everyone knows each other already from undergrad, grad school, or summer programs. Or all three. It’s a small world.
• Probably nobody standing in line to get anyone’s autograph at AGNES. To be fair, that likely only happens at Strata because along with the autograph you get a free O’Reilly book, and the autographer is the author. Still, I think we should figure out a way to add this to math conferences somehow, because it’s fun to feel like you’re among celebrities.
• No theme music at AGNES when I start my talk, unlike my keynote discussion with Julie Steele on Thursday at Strata. Which is too bad, because I was gonna request “Eye of the Tiger”.