Update, somewhere in January

By now, I'm kind of losing track of which day is which . . . ironic, because of spending so much time on and off of train tracks.  So I'm a little bit past due in saying that life continues to be rich and full around here, and "here" has been a lot of places.

My week started off in Minnesota, where I got to catch up with Nelson and Sizzling.  Sizzling had been traveling, so the first part of the week was a bit of get-to-know-you time with her new husband, and also catching up on the lastest from Nelson (he's moved into a new apartment with T).  They're making the place look very much like their own little nest; it's small and cozy. 

About mid-week, I switched locations and stayed in the home of a Minnesota mathematician who -- months and months ago -- randomly offered to put me up in his place "if I was ever passing through", and so I not-so-randomly took him up on his incredibly kind offer.  I hit it off immediately with him and his wife; they're both book nerds and have a gentle humor.  The mathematician happens to teach a course where he has students do 3D printing of optical illusions, which is very much in the realm of stuff I'm doing my own research on, and so this was an incredibly welcome coincidence.

Me and my super nice hosts, with a ring puzzle he'd gotten as a gift.

There were three other things I spent time on while in Minnesota.

1. Shivering. 
   The temps were in the single digits, on either side of 0°F, the whole time I was there.
2. Math. 
   I'd learned some good stuff during my stay in Seattle, and I used my Minnesota layover as a way to dig into it.  I spent some of the time being utterly confused, some of the time doing elaborate and complicated geometric constructions, and the last bit of time making beautiful -- and much, much less complicated -- structures, and by the time I was ready to leave Minnesota, I had something written up to share with my new Seattle besties.
3. Changing Amtrak reservations repeatedly.
   Because of the cold, Amtrak canceled trains on me.  First, they cancelled the Minneapolis-to-Chicago train on the 18th.  Then, the 19th.  Then, the 20th.  When they cancelled the train for the 21st, I started rewriting the Eagles' Hotel California to become the Amtrak Minnesota:  "you can check in any time you like, but you can never lee-aaavvvvee".  Then I rented a car, one-way, for the 18th.  (Props to SixT rental car company; I'd never heard of them before but they were great to work with).

The car rental place upgraded me to a BMW X3.  
Was it nice?  Well, it had heated seats, automated everything,
smooth ride, and keyless ignition, so that's all good.
But did it have a cassette deck like my 2001 Prius?
No, it did not.

I drove to Chicago in a day.  The drive was relatively easy, but I have to say I've gotten spoiled by trains, where I can take a nap, work on my computer, use the restroom without having to wonder where the next exit is, etc.  

So then the next day, I resumed my train travels, riding along beautiful rivers and forested hills from Chicago into the Union station in DC.  Somewhere between Harper's Ferry and Rockville, Maryland, the scenery started reminding me of the places my parents and sisters and I had gone for weekend walks in my youth.  I wouldn't have thought I could recognize types of rocks, but I was awash in nostalgia because of large, gray boulders that made me think of "Big Rock", a snowman-like trio of rocks in the side of a hill near our home that my sisters and I always clambered up, often accompanied by our dogs.  

And from remembrances of dogs to actual dog experiences, I hopped on the next train (finding an even earlier connection to take than on my original ticket), and arrived in Richmond to be picked up by Gosling.  We've had some great walks and talks.  This morning we did a bit of a workout together (with furry coaches adding to the degree of difficulty on some of the moves), and we got to go to church where a dear friend of the family, Stanley, was preaching, and where I got some great hugs and smiles from his wife (of course, also a dear friend), Terry. 

Meanwhile, Kinderling and David have been traveling the country, narrowly missing me on some of their stops.  Kinderling says: 

We went to cosi in Ohio today. It was so fun for the kids!

Explaining to Achild that at one point you needed to pay quarters and change to talk on the pay phone "That's just nonsense" she says

Pretty sure even the penguins at Indianapolis zoo were questioning our sanity today, as we went to the zoo in one degree weather. Everyone stayed warm:) Achild enjoyed swimming with the snow

And now that it's . . . whatever day it is . . .,  well, that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous. 

How I was confused and wrong, and I love it

Mathematical lore has it that, at one point, the mathematician Julia Robinson was asked to keep a timesheet detailing how she was spending her work days. Apparently, one week her time log looked like this: 

• Monday: tried to prove theorem.
• Tuesday: tried to prove theorem.
• Wednesday: tried to prove theorem.
• Thursday: tried to prove theorem. 
• Friday: Theorem false.

So much this. I think the one of the stumbling blocks for people who fear math is that they feel -- for good reason -- that not knowing the answer, or (worse) thinking you know the answer but are mistaken, . . . that those are bad places to be.  But as a person who spends my life thinking about math, I've learned to be comfortable in those very spots.  It's when I am happily exploring the playground of my ignorance that I get to learn the coolest new things.   

So it is that, after my meet-up in Seattle stared me on a new collaboration, that I tried to figure out a geometric construction for something that those algebraists indicated would be possible -- something about turning one conic (like an ellipse or hyperbola) into 5 new conics that had a nifty coincidence. 

The picture I was hoping to construct
(and that eventually, I did!)

My time sheet looked a bit different.

• Thursday:  Rode the train all day, pondering the stuff the algebraists had told me.  They speak another language.
• Friday:  Tried unsuccessfully to construct the conics. None of my techniques worked.
• Saturday:  Figured out a construction method, very involved, but doable, and successfully constructed the conics.
• Sunday:  After zoom church, spent the entire day documenting the construction in excruciating detail.
• Monday: Realized my construction was WAY overly complicated, and there's a much (MUCH) easier way to do it.  Decided to scrap all that past work and start over.

I'd spent a full day trying to carefully document the
construction techniques I'd been using. 
Can you see the influences of the comic-book writer I'd met with?

One of the things this description doesn't explain is how insights tend to come, not while I'm beating my head against the wall, but in times of relative rest.  The breakthrough for my PhD thesis came -- after months of intense work -- while I was washing a kitchen floor.  This week, both of my insights came not while I was cranking through the math itself, but as I was drifting off to sleep.  Or rather, they came as I was trying to drift off to sleep, but then I was so math-excited that it was hard to relax, because I just wanted to jump up and do math again.

My brain at night. 
Or, an overly complicated geometric construction.

Much of the early parts of my trip have been taken up with meetings with people, and this particular Minnesota layover is much less scheduled.  That's turned out to be excellent planning on my part, because having these days completely to myself has been such a gift, getting to live in my own head like this. 

And fortunately for me, I like those intense periods, even when (and sometimes because) I'm doing things in a fog of ignorance that eventually, I hope, clears. The insights come in a flash during the quiet times, but they need those periods of intense work beforehand, or they don't come at all.

In the middle of my training . . .

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville. Oh my goodness, but my choice to do this train trip around the country has been so incredibly rewarding!

First of all, there's the train. The scenery has been breathtaking and mesmerizing. The windows of the train are much larger than those of airplanes, and west of Chicago the trains are double deckers, so, from my seat up high, I can see so much of the surrounding areas. Each train has had an observation club car, with open seating and tables, and with giant windows all around. In the club cars, people play cards, chat with one another, and take pictures and videos of the world outside. Because there's a club car where people can go to make noise, the regular train cars are pretty quiet. On my most recent trip, there was a pair of Amish women speaking Pennsylvania Dutch (Montana Dutch?) in the seats ahead of me, a family with an absolutely enchanted seven-year-old, a young couple a few rows back who cuddled and giggled over videos on their phone, another guy across the aisle who spent pretty much the entire trip reading his Bible.  Some of the trains have been pretty full up; the last one had lots of empty seats.

Scenes from my windows

On my trip from San Francisco to Seattle, I woke up in southern Oregon to see snow-covered pine trees out my window, and that particular view in many variations lasted for hours and hours.  Gorges with snow-covered pine trees; mountains with snow-covered pines; forests of snow-covered pine trees; towns nestled among snow-covered pine trees; rivers winding through snow-covered pine trees.  And then we tunneled our way through the mountains into Washington state, where all of a sudden there was green grass among the bare trees.  When I left Seattle, we tunneled our way back into snow again, and my entire trip through Montana ad much of North Dakota was so snowy that sometimes the windows seemed just like a white window onto fog. I arrived (three hours behind schedule) into Minneapolis, with temperatures hovering in the single digits either side of zero, and glad to have made it this far: the same train would be canceled for the next three days because of the snow and cold sweeping the area.

So much snow, some of it came in the train on the ground floor (not near my seats)!

Even better has been meeting up with all sorts of fun people.  In San Francisco, I got to catch up with many mathy friends from grad school or from past collaborations.  My husband is amazing at reaching out and keeping in touch with people, but that's not part of my own hard drive's operating system, so for me to do the same is a lot of work.  But bumping into friends at the meetings is so good for the psyche and the soul!  After the meetings were over, I invited myself over to the home of one of my favorite authors (he wrote his PhD as a comic--how cool is *that*!?), who was kind enough to let me impose on him.  We went hiking with his kids and dog, and we talked about ways to incorporate comics into explanations of mathematics.  Of course, this has me bursting with ideas.  

Friends old and new!  So many smiles.

Then in Seattle, where once again I'd just invited myself into other people's spaces, the mathematician I'd asked to meet up with invited a couple of others to join us (including one guy who I think of as a total Rock Star in this field), and they got excited enough about the stuff I'd been doing based on their work that she said, "Let's write a paper together!".  She opened up a shared Overleaf document and picked a very high-visibility journal as our target, and -- just like that -- I have a cool new group of collaborators.  Whoop!

Me with a statue of the UW Husky:
a very well-behaved animal.

By the time I got to Minnesota, where I'll be spending a bunch of days, it was lovely to get a ride from the train station from my stepdaughter's husband, and after he took me out to lunch with his friends I hunkered, spending the entire day trying to draw a diagram and bombing at it.  As is often the case, though, just as I was getting ready to drift off to sleep I figured out the construction technique, and my second day in the snowy tundra led to this awesome diagram.  

Something something something cool about homologies and intersections of conics.

The underlying construction lines are . . . convoluted.
Thank goodness I can hide them in GeoGebra if I don't want to see them!

So I've had beautiful travels, and amazing gatherings with acquaintances old and new, and also some really productive math time.  Like, seriously: how could life get better than this?

Gosling tells us her dog is undergoing acupuncture;
I think he looks like a cuddly porcupine.

Coming up next, I'll have a bit more downtime in Minnesota to catch up on writing up some geometry stuff.  I'll get to meet up with Nelson (who tells me he's in a new apartment with T) and with Sizzling, and I'll also spend time at the home of another mathematician and his family.  From there, Nelson and I will eventually bop over to Chicago, and from there, I'll head solo to Virginia to see more family, more mathematicians, some very dear friends (hi, Terry! hi, Stanley!), and even an artist I've wanted to meet.  

And that's the news from my little vertex of our family, as I continue to be wealthy in my adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.

Update in training

 Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.   The turnover of the calendar has me in training -- not just because my running buddies decided we needed to sign up for a half marathon that'll happen right before my birthday, but also because I very literally got on a train.  I bought an Amtrak USA Rail Pass that gives me 10 tickets in 30 days.  

December 30, I boarded my first train that took me to Pittsburgh.

From about midnight that night to the 31st, I travelled from Pittsburgh to Chicago.

In the Chicago terminal, I got to kick around for a while, making origami frogs for a pair of delighted Amish children, who also joined me in running up (and walking down) a giant set of stairs. I was watched over by a pair of stone angels (above those two columns in the right-hand picture).

From Chicago, I took my third train -- this one, all the way to San Francisco.

I think I was in Omaha, Nebraska when the calendar flipped over from 2023 to 2024.  

And after two more days of amazing views (not amazing photos, but amazing views),
I arrived in San Francisco just in time for the big math meetings.

The train from Chicago to California is not only a lot more picturesque than the one down the East Coast to Florida, but also a lot quieter.  The fact that there's an observation car really helps, because at night, people who wanted to talk could (and were strongly encouraged to) go there, so the rest of us could sleep.  I had two different seating companions, both of whom were mostly quiet like me, but who were also fascinating when they weren't quiet.  The first was a former Navy nurse who now has many grandchildren and even great grandchildren; the second was a young man who was getting ready to go to college where he hoped to study to become a funeral director.  ("I know that sounds very odd," he told me, "but my girlfriend is interested in this, and I know the job won't be taken over by AI").  

While I was traveling across the country, Inkling and her friends celebrated their own ball drop.  It wasn't the stately lowering that you see with other balls on TV or at large outdoor gatherings -- we both agree that calling those "drops" is a disappointing name.  No, she and her friends dropped a ball.

10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1...

. . . Happy New Year!

Actually, the ball drop wasn't quite as perfect as those pictures represent. She says, 

"We had our own ball drop at the party I went to last night

And our ball didn't slowly descend-- it dropped with a solid thud.  

(A little too solid, actually... We had to throw it a few times to get it to break open because our ball was also a piñata!)"

"Mama, thank you for teaching me to make an address label piñata!"

Yuppers, those address labels we get (unsolicited, but from charities trying to solicit us) can be put to good use!

At any rate, back to San Francisco.  The math meetings have been super lovely.  I gave a talk, led a workshop, and participated in a panel.  I attended a bunch of other great talks.  I'm saturated with new directions to take my research in, new contacts that I've made, former contacts that I got to reconnect with, . . .  it's been awesome.  

A set of stairs I love.

Here's the most story-worthy thing that happened, though:  losing my phone!  I'd taken it out at lunchtime while I was sitting on a bench in a park, and somehow I didn't notice it was gone until almost 5 p.m.   I like to think I don't really care about my phone, but here on the other side of the country from my home, it's my connection to everyone (and to my train tickets, and all my two-step verification things . . . ).  Naturally, I tried not to freak while nonetheless feeling quite panicky.  I retraced my steps; I asked the hotel and the conference center if anyone had turned in a phone (no, sorry), and I retraced my steps again.

When I was finally back in my room with wifi, I checked on my computer to see if I'd set up "FindMyPhone" -- I knew it had been on my to-do list for a while, and couldn't remember whether I'd done it.  To my surprise and delight, not only had I set it up (thank you, former me!), but the app said that it located my phone, and that it was still right near that bench where I'd taken it out!  

So, back I went to the park and the bench. No sign of it. I asked some passers by to call it, and they did, but we couldn't hear any ringing. A dude in an orange vest asked if I needed help, and since I wasn't familiar with the orange jackets I waved him off, but he was concerned enough he asked again. I explained that "Find my phone" had said my phone was somewhere in this plaza, but I couldn't find it. The minute he asked, "was it a red phone?", I knew everything was going to be okay.

The orange vest people are "Block Ambassadors"; the San Francisco tourist district hires them to be of assistance to tourists and other visitors -- like me! Cooper (that was the guy's name) called a bunch of people, and we eventually found the office it had been turned in at. He was helpful and friendly and calm the whole time. Another Block Ambassador named Zach chipped in and helped us find the exact spot of the office, which was right around the corner from that bench.  The app nailed the correct location to within about 20 feet.

I told Cooper that if I adopt any more kids,
I'm naming the next one after him.
I took this photo with my phone, of course:
Cooper and Zach are the reason I have it back.

What's next?  I'm going to rest my brain after a really productive and energizing (but also draining, temporarily) conference.  I'll spend one more day in San Francisco, hopefully meeting up with an author I'm a huge fan of, and then tomorrow night I'll board a train bound for Seattle.

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours turn on your "find my phone" apps, and be similarly prosperous.