Category: Mathematical Life

I can recall a time when a referee report arrived for a paper with a coauthor. I’m blurring the details, because the details would identify them. They are strong, and in some quarters have a reputation for being less careful than good. The report had read the reputation before it read the paper. You could…

The paper was rejected, which was fine. I was a second- or third-year graduate student, it was an early paper, and rejection was the expected outcome. What wasn’t fine was the report. Alongside the mathematics it had an opinion about me: that the junior person needed to learn how to write a paper. I took…

I arrived at graduate school from a large state university in the middle of the rankings, where I had been something of an anomaly. I stood out in the mathematics classes, I knew it, and it did me a great deal of good. Within a few weeks of arriving, I had worked out where I…

The talk ends, and in the hallway someone says it: that’s an Annals paper. Or the variant, delivered with the same nod: it settles a conjecture of Professor X. I’m compositing here, but not by much. I’ve heard those sentences in every department I’ve belonged to, and I’ve said them. They’re compliments, usually sincere and…

There was a stretch, working on computations connected to the corona problem, when I would finish dinner, stay at the table, and not get up for hours. Nothing about the work was mysterious. I had a sense of what to do, I knew it was likely to work, and the computations simply had to be…

The chair came to my office, handed me a letter, and told me to go celebrate. I can still see the office. I can still see the person. The letter said what I had spent years hoping it would say, and the instruction that came with it was kind and sincere and exactly what you…

A senior colleague told me, more than once and always kindly, that if I wanted a raise I should go get an outside offer. He was not being cynical. He was doing me a favor; passing along, unprompted, the kind of thing nobody writes down and everybody is supposed to somehow already know. It was…

There is a particular piece of mental arithmetic I have done many hundreds of times, in many seminar rooms, and I have never once done it correctly. It goes: I am lost. Nobody else has asked anything. If I ask, thirty people will notice that I am lost, and some of them will remember. The…