My dad suffered from Lewy body dementia for 6 years before he passed. That mixture of loss and relief is so familiar.

I am a mathematician by training and profession. I am temperamentally disinclined to make sweeping claims like what you have attributed to me. To the extent that I am making a larger claim, it is about research math departments in the US, not “any STEM professor”

With graduate students it is a very different story.

In my twenty plus years of experience as a math student and math faculty member, it is not common for math professors in the many different research departments I have been in or visited. I can speak only to my (extensive but not universal) experience.

Twenty two years later it remains the only such invitation I’ve known about in the four different math departments I’ve been student or faculty in.

It was very out of the ordinary in the context of the department. No other professors invited the class over, much less to a party they were having that was not just for the class (context I did not include at the beginning because I thought it was strange enough).

That class is precisely what I was thinking of when I said a humanities professor had done it. (I hedged and used the plural in case there was a second example I couldn’t recall.)

I think it’s entirely dependent on the culture of the institution and department. I had humanities professors do this but Biss is the only math professor I’ve known (and I am still in math) to invite over an entire undergraduate class he was still teaching.

I’m so sorry this happened to you. I took topology with him in (I think) winter 2004 and thought it was super weird that he invited our entire class to his house for a party. (I did not go.)

What’s the Matter With Texas A&M? Five presidents in five years. Firings of “woke” professors. Crackdowns on Plato. Inside state leaders’ efforts to remake a great university.

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This is a great thread that applies equally well to math programs.

Damn who knew the law of all places would have so many rules

She came to the B/CS no kings protest, so at least she realizes we’re also in the district

I tried them for a year and loved them so much I just subscribed for the next ten.

If you’re looking for a variety of millennial-coded crosswords that don’t mess around with cutesy clues for fascists, arrive frequently, can be played online or printed on paper, are reasonably priced, and have a great response, I strongly recommend @avcx.bsky.social

The Ivy and Bean books are great! Also Kate DiCamillo has a one-off (I think) called flora and Ulysses, which is about a girl and her friend Ulysses (who is a squirrel that obtains super powers after being sucked into a vacuum)

I read Vonnegut’s breakfast of champions when I was 14 and took the same lesson from it. I’ve only recently gotten into discworld and love its moral spine.

We started a new topic: eigenvalue counting, working towards the weyl law.

On Wednesday we discussed symmetries of the Riemann curvature tensor and introduced the ricci and scalar curvatures.

Yesterday we managed to introduce the curvature tensor. (Finally!)

We finished the PDE superstructure needed to get the exponential energy decay. Next up: eigenvalue counting

No Kings protest in College Station, TX. Texas A&M showed up. Somewhere around two thousand people showed up. #NoKings.

We are proving exponential energy decay for the damped wave equation under the geometric control condition. We have proved the resolvent estimate and are working towards the result.

After fall break we have introduced manifolds and left the comfort of flat space times behind. We are barreling toward curvature and (finally!) the Einstein equations

Today we introduced Christoffel symbols and the covariant derivative

We proved that semiclassical defect measures are concentrated on the energy surface and invariant under Hamilton flow. We will start talking about the damped wave equation soon!

Today we finally introduced semiclassical defect measures. I am hoping to start talking about the damped wave equation on Wednesday

We’re doing general coordinate changes and about to introduce the covariant derivative

I want to get to semiclassical measures so I just presented most of the rest of the calculus as a list of properties. I think we will probably use Hörmander’s trick for L2 boundedness, though.

Changing coordinates, tangent and cotangent spaces! It’s getting fun!