222 words on Uni
Last week gave us a local workshop on higher structures which was easily the coolest thing happening around here in a while. Not only did it cover interesting topics, it also meant that a sizeable portion of the people whose papers we read and who do similar maths were all of a sudden sitting right here, giving talks, and having their brains picked.
It’s also worth noting that Team California was rather well-prepared. Offering slides for their talks along with extra references on a web page even before things took. That’s extremely convenient for preparing, looking up or reviewing things. One was even tempted to use this service to review some of the earlier slides in a talk when further questions arose on the iPod (which needs search in PDFs and better display performance for them before this becomes entirely convenient). And while electronic slides may not be the coolest way of presenting mathematics, they certainly avoid the all-too-common problem of people scribbling down the names of collaborators or related papers in an illegible handwriting. While common terms can usually be recognised even in bad handwriting, foreign names - which you should spell correctly when searching the paper databases for them - remain mostly a mystery in chalk.
… and for some reason a while lot of Kaiserschmarrn was consumed whenever possible.