Overview
The goal of this course is to introduce students to mathematics colloquia and related mathematics talks. The structure of the course consists of attending colloquia; there are no lectures or exams.Instructor
Dagan KarpOffice: 3414 Shan
Office hours: Tue 3-4pm, and open door.
Colloquia
The Claremont Colleges present Mathematics Colloquia on every Wednesday, 4:15 - 5:15 pm. Talks this semester will take place in Room B460 of the Shanahan Center on HMC Campus.Refreshments are served before the talks at 3:45 pm. The mathematics colloquium series at the Claremeont Colleges is presented by the Claremont Center for Mathematical Sciences, which maintains the colloquium calendar here: http://colleges.claremont.edu/ccms/events/category/colloquium/
Other Events
In addition to colloquia, students in Math 199 may, for credit, attend other approved events, such as a Moody Lecture. If you're wondering if a given event is approved for Math 199 credit, just ask the instructor.Attendance
To receive credit for attending a talk, fill out the Math 199 Attendance Form: bity.ly/2019SpringMath199.Grading
To pass colloquium, you must attend 7 colloquia or other approved events, and complete the attendence form for each event.Advice
Why is Math 199 a required course? Why are colloquia useful? What if I don't understand? How can I get the most out of this experience?To shed light on all of this, here are some thoughts from Ravi Vakil's advice page for his potential students.
- Older graduate students will verify that there is a high correlation between those students who are doing the broadest and deepest work and those who are regularly attending seminars. Many people erroneously conclude that those who are the strongest students therefore go to seminars, while in fact the causation goes very much in the opposite direction.
- Go to research seminars earlier than you think you should. Do not just go to seminars that you think are directly related to what you do (or more precisely, what you currently think you currently do). You should certainly go to every single seminar related to algebraic geometry that you can, and likely drop by other seminars occasionally too. Learning to get information out of research seminars is an acquired skill, usually acquired much later than the skill of reading mathematics. You may think it isn't helpful to go to a seminar where you understand just 5% of what the speaker says, and may want to wait until you are closer to 100%; but no one is anywhere near 100% (even the speaker!), so you should go anyway.
- Try to follow the thread of the talk, and when you get thrown, try to get back on again. (This isn't always possible, and admittedly often the fault lies with the speaker.)
- At the end of the talk, you should try to answer the questions: What question(s) is the speaker trying to answer? Why should we care about them? What flavor of results has the speaker proved? Do I have a small example of the phenonenon under discussion? You can even scribble down these questions at the start of the talk, and jot down answers to them during the talk.
- Try to extract three words from the talk (no matter how tangentially related to the subject at hand) that you want to know the definition of. Then after the talk, ask me what they mean. (In general, feel free to touch base with me after every seminar. I might tell you something interesting related to the talk.)
- New version of the previous jot: try the Three Things exercise.
- See if you can get one lesson from the talk (broadly interpreted). If you manage to get one lesson from each talk you go to, you'll learn a huge amount over time, although you'll only realize this after quite a while. (If you are unable to learn even one thing about mathematics from a talk, think about what the speaker could have done differently so that you could have learned something. You can learn a lot about giving good talks by thinking about what makes bad talks bad.)
- Try to ask one question at as many seminars as possible, either during the talk, or privately afterwards. The act of trying to formulating an interesting question (for you, not the speaker!) is a worthwhile exercise, and can focus the mind.
- Here's a phenomenon I was surprised to find: you'll go to talks, and hear various words, whose definitions you're not so sure about. At some point you'll be able to make a sentence using those words; you won't know what the words mean, but you'll know the sentence is correct. You'll also be able to ask a question using those words. You still won't know what the words mean, but you'll know the question is interesting, and you'll want to know the answer. Then later on, you'll learn what the words mean more precisely, and your sense of how they fit together will make that learning much easier. The reason for this phenomenon is that mathematics is so rich and infinite that it is impossible to learn it systematically, and if you wait to master one topic before moving on to the next, you'll never get anywhere. Instead, you'll have tendrils of knowledge extending far from your comfort zone. Then you can later backfill from these tendrils, and extend your comfort zone; this is much easier to do than learning "forwards". (Caution: this backfilling is necessary. There can be a temptation to learn lots of fancy words and to use them in fancy sentences without being able to say precisely what you mean. You should feel free to do that, but you should always feel a pang of guilt when you do.)
- Your thesis problem may well come out of an idea you have while sitting in a seminar.
- Go to seminar dinners when at all possible, even though it is scary, and no one else is going.
- Go to colloquia fairly often, so you have a reasonable idea of what is happening in other parts of mathematics. It is amazing what can become relevant to your research. You won't believe it until it happens to you. And it won't happen to you unless you go to colloquia. Ditto for seminars in other fields.