Casting Out Nines

My busier-than-usual Spring Break is all but over with. Here’s a brief update.

The ICMC went off much better than it looked like it was going to. This was my first of a three-year stint as Student Activities Director for the Indiana section of the MAA, and while my predecessor was really great an answering my questions about how to organize the ICMC, he could only answer the questions I could think of, and the un-thought-of questions were starting to pile up at an exponential pace the week before the contest. But with the generous help of Mike Axtell, who — sadly — is leaving the Indiana section for a new position in Minnesota, all the logistics went off just fine and we had no major incidents. Kudos to the Purdue, Rose-Hulman, and Taylor teams who finished first, second, and third respectively.

That was last weekend. On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I had a very nice time at Benedictine University near Chicago as the guest speaker to the Math Club and to Manu Kaur’s topics course in cryptology. I gave a talk to the Math Club on cryptology in general — 50 minutes to cover the whole subject! — and despite some technical difficulties, the talk went reasonably well. There were close to 75-80 people in the audience! Then, the next day, I gave a talk on the Digital Signature Algorithm to the crypto class. In between, I got the rare opportunity to talk shop with Prof. Kaur on cryptography, and I also got a very nice tour of nearby Naperville, which is really quite lovely. (Not what I expected for Chicagoland suburbia.)

Benedictine has a fine department, and I was especially impressed by their students. To have close to 80 students show up in the middle of the day for a Math Club ta,lk at a school of under 3,000 students, is really amazing, and I got some very good questions after the talk. Following the digital signatures talk, one student asked me a really insightful question about Blowfish and SSL encryption; not only was this an undergrad asking the question, he was an undergrad chemistry major. And everywhere you looked, students were working on things — the science labs in particular seemed to be full every moment I was there.

Special treat for me: I got to spend the night in the extraordinary St. Procopius Abbey amongst the Benedictine monks. I’ve been reading Thomas Merton and the like for a long time, and the monastic life has been a guiding force in my Christian experience ever since I became a Christian, but until this week I had never actually gotten to experience monastic life firsthand. The abbey itself is breathtaking, with its Edward Dart-designed architecture combining soaring vertical spaces with hidden rooms for prayer and meditation, with a common thread of simplicity and silence throughout. I’m considering making a longer retreat there sometime soon. Something about the kindness, simplicity, and warmth of the abbey and the monks who live there follows one home from a place like this, and I could certainly use more of that.

So I’m wrapping up break doing the stay-at-home dad thing, having stayed with the girls for the last couple of days and spending the weekend doing the same before getting back to work on Monday. Ironically, this semester I made the conscious choice at the beginning not to emphasize scholarship so much but focus almost all my energies on teaching, but I ended up with one of the busiest semesters I’ve had scholarship-wise in a long time, mostly stuff that I have done or wrapped up this week! Now to finish off those pesky last five weeks of the semester.

If you’ve been submitting mathematics articles to refereed journals only to have them sent back to you every time, there’s hope. You can try submitting them to the new journal Rejecta Mathematica, which will consist only of papers which have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals. From their web site:

At Rejecta Mathematica, we believe that many previously rejected papers can nonetheless have a very real value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:

• “mapping the blind alleys of science”: papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions; 
• “reinventing the wheel”: papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas; 
• “squaring the circle”: papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;
• “applications of cold fusion”: papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;
  
• “misunderstood genius”: other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.

Rejecta articles also allow the authors to speak out in defense of their rejected articles and include an open letter from the authors describing any known flaws in the paper.

And yes, although there’s no formal peer review process to get a paper into Rejecta, you can still have a paper submission rejected.

[ht Math-Blog]

So I spent the entire day today up the road at Butler at an NSF workshop for people interested in writing grant proposals. It was very informative, and it was especially helpful to have most of the actual program directors there in person — all of whom were friendly, very down-to-earth and open to talking with faculty grunts like me. (One request for the NSF folks, though: Please, for the love of God, consider the 10/20/30 rule for your presentations. Four straight hours of 40+ slide Power Point presentations done in 20-point font almost (but not quite) drove me crazy. Thanks.)

What I wanted to blog about right now, though, isn’t the NSF stuff per se, but more about the feeling I always seem to take away from conferences or workshops like this where there are a lot of people who actually do research. The feeling is one of being on the outside looking in, of being past my prime.

To understand this, you need some context. It’s been 10 years now since I finished my PhD in mathematics, with a specialty in some very esoteric homology theories that I myself never fully understood, and the use of exotic category theory stuff to make the symbols associated with those homology theories do what I wanted them to do. At the end of the day, I had proven that Quinn homology was isomorphic to G-equivariant homology when G is a discrete group acting cellularly on a simplicial complex. I worked for another year following my dissertation to edit it down into publishable form, and got it published.

But that was the last real mathematical research I have touched since then, with the lone exception of a paper I got published in Cryptologia a couple of years ago. And that paper was so error-riddled in the original draft that it only barely was accepted at all, and  even then it was more of a curiosity than an actual result. But it was research. However, it took me a year to write it, and over a year to edit it since part of the editing process was interrupted by traveling to China to adopt our oldest daughter and stumbling into being a parent.

Getting that paper published, especially since it was in an area (cryptology) in which all my training has been self-teaching and in which I have no formal coursework, makes me believe that I still have the intellectual chops to do mathematical research. But the amount of time it takes to get anything done, and the number of times I’ve sat down to try and learn new things and get out to the frontiers of a subject where the research happens, makes me think that I’m too old or too involved with other things in life or carrying too heavy of a teaching load to make it happen.

Don’t get me wrong — my family is more important to me than research, and teaching is what drove me into being a college professor to begin with. But I also want to be a well-rounded professional, which means that not only am I teaching excellently and leading a fulfilling personal life, I am also learning — consuming and producing new knowledge both for the purposes of the world and my discipline at large but also for my colleagues and students. The more I look back on the last several years, the more I realize that my scholarship and the attempts to satisfy my hunger for learning have not gone anywhere.

And this is no more frustrating than when I am around a bunch of talented researchers, especially scholars who work at liberal arts colleges whose job is primarily teaching but still have the time and space to learn and be experts in their areas. I have been trying to reinvent myself as a scholar over the last few months in a different area — computational linguistics and data analytics — in hopes that I could succeed in scholarship here where I had not succeeded elsewhere. Things went well over the summer. But when the semester started,  everything ground to a halt as every moment of the week was taken up by grading, prepping for the next class, grading some more, etc. Then, today, I was walking from one meeting room to the next when a guy behind me starting talking about his research in computational linguistics. I turned around to introduce myself, thinking perhaps it was somebody from IU’s excellent linguistics department. But it turned out to be… someone from a neighboring liberal arts college. Where they have the same emphasis on teaching as we do. So, how is this guy able to get his research done where I can’t even find the time to open my Jurafsky and Martin?

So I am left with a question, which I wrote in large print at the bottom of my workshop notes today: How does somebody like me — holding a PhD but 10 years removed from any significant research, not anywhere close to the cutting edge of any discipline, and tenured in a position at a small, teaching-oriented liberal arts college — how does somebody like me get to the point where he can do research in his field or a closely related field? Is it possible? If so, how do I get there? If not, how do I come to terms with knowing that my math research days are over, even though intellectually I feel like I am still in the game, and want to be in the game?

[Photo by slight clutter]