F*******n
发帖数: 8 | 1 The absolute worst talk (once again, expositorily speaking) was by Gang Tian
. Here there was no room at all for productive day-dreaming. Tian's talk was
extremely technical, very dry, and the transparencies were typed with small
font, that probably made it hard to follow even for the ten or whatever
experts in the audience.
Appendix to Opinion 48: Impressions From The International Congress of
Mathematicians 2002 (ICM 2002, Beijing , Aug. 20-29):
By Doron Zeilberger
Written: Oct. 10, 2002
http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Appendix48.html
It is all too familiar. You go to a colloquium talk, supposedly meant for a
"general mathematical audience" and "graduate students", and you don't
understand a word. OK, being clueless for one hour per week is not the end
of the world, but what if you go to a National Meeting?, or worse, THE BIG
HAPPENING of mathematics, ICM, and try to go to ALL the plenary talks?
I recently came back from ICM 2002, in Beijing, and once again was struck by
the fact that the Tower of Babel hit us mathematicians particularly hard.
In addition to the intrinsic compartimization, over-specialization and
splintering of math, most mathematicians (even, or perhaps especially, the
most prominent) have no idea how to give a general talk.
Luckily, there are exceptions. Noga Alon's talk "Discrete Mathematics:
Methods and Challenges" was by far the best talk. In addition to the lucid
and very accessible presentation, the transparencies were very readable,
even from far away, and he spoke slowly and clearly, so everybody,
regardless of specialty or native language, could easily follow (and be
fascinated!).
The second-best talk (in the first week, I couldn't stay for the second week
, and I am sure that at least Ed Witten's talk was excellent, as usual) was
also in discrete math, by Shafi Goldwasser. Both the content and
presentation were fascinating and very accessible (in spite of the few power
-point glitches, that made her exclaim: "Computers hate me, and I am a
computer scientist"). The only minor flaw was that she talked too fast.
If you think that it is not surprising that talks in Discrete Math are
accessible, since it is a young field, and hence requires less background,
then you should go and hear Michael Hopkins. His talk was first-rate, and
even I, who has "topology anxiety", understood almost everything. So it is
possible to give lucid and accessible talks, even in topology. Besides the
math, Michael also had great one-liners, that could serve us all well, two
of them being "It is very important in algebraic geometry not to divide by
anything you don't have to divide by" (probably good advice in all areas),
and "The reason it was so hard to prove it before was that we were asking
for too little".
The next-in-line in my ratings (of the first 11 plenary talks) is a tie
between David Mumford and Douglas Arnold. Mumford's talk was insightful and
entertaining, and had many good quotes, my favorite being: ``Images of the
real world are Renormalization-Group fixed-points''. Douglas Arnold showed
very convincingly that Numerical Analysis has gotten to be very
sophisticated (differential complexes and de Rahm cohomology!), and that
good a priori error analysis can save lives and avoid catastrophes.
Neither good nor bad (as far as quality of exposition goes, I am sure that
all the talks presented excellent mathematics) was Victor Kac's talk. It was
a bit too technical, and dwelt too much on the speaker's own research,
rather than giving an overview of the field. But it had many good moments (
like some beautiful q-identities) and the grande finale that claimed that,
notwithstanding Genesis, Light was created on the 4th day of Creation.
Bad, but not terrible (once again, from the point of view of exposition)
were the talks by Luis Caffarelli and Uffe Haagerup. I have to admit that by
then I got a little burnt-out, and sneaked out, to the exhibits, for about
half of each of these talks.
The third-worst (among the 11 talks of the first week) was the first, given
Wed. morning by the brand-new Fields medalist Laurent Lafforgue, who talked
about "Chtoucas des Drinfeld" and the Langlands Programme. He started by
lamenting that French is no longer the lingua franca of math, and
hypocritically cited "diversity" (if I had to name a culture that abhors
diversity it is the French, they want everyone to Only speak French). As a "
compromise" he talked in (excellent) English, but the transparencies were in
French and Chinese. Frankly, Laurent, I don't think that it matters what
natural language you choose for your talks, since no one understands them
anyway, except perhaps ten experts (out of more than 4000 potential
listeners). The only interesting part was the human factoid that the initial
manuscript of 600 pages contained a gap, that luckily got fixed by doing
away with it, like in Wiles's FLT proof, but in this case Lafforgue did not
need Richard Taylor (I was told later that Lafforgue behaved very honorably
when he found the mistake in the earlier draft and offered to withdraw his
acceptance of the IHES offer, unless he fixed it, which he did). On second
thought, there was at least one mathematical statement that I did understand
. Sometime during the talk, he had the equation 2=1+1 (when he discussed the
previous work of Drinfeld for rank 2, where there are only two partitions:
2 itself and 1+1).
By the way, the second Fields medalist, Vladimir Voevodsky, gave an
excellent "informal seminar", that was much more accessible, and it is clear
that he is not just a brilliant specialist, but posseses great mathematical
culture.
The second-worst plenary talk was by Yum-Tong Siu. I am sure that he made a
great effort to only require, as he claimed at least four times during the
talk, "minimal background", and he also used (not intentionally, it was
clear that he is a very nice and warm human being) the intimidating phrase "
everybody knows...", e.g. about the Kodaira vanishing theorem. Sorry, Prof.
Siu, but at least I never heard of it. But you can still get something from
even such an incomprehensible talk, because of the "marginalia". These can
start a sequence of amusing day-dreams. Siu mentioned (at least twice) that
Andre Bloch did his great work in a "mental asylum". That lead me to ponder
about other mathematical murderers I have known (or heard of, like the
Unabomber). Also he kept quoting familiar names, of people I know personally
, like Harold Boas (and his collaborator Emil Staube), and Harold Boas lead,
in my mind, to his father, Ralph Boas, whom I remember fondly as the editor
who accepted my first single-authored paper.
However, the name that pleased me the most amongst those mentioned by Yum-
Tong Siu was that of Marc Levine, who was my colleague at Penn, back in 1982
-1983, and was coordinating the Calculus sections, when he was tenure-track,
and I was visiting. It was nice to hear his name so often, also at the
opening ceremony, for work connected to the work of one of the Fields-
medalists. He also gave an invited talk. So Marc has certainly "made it to
the Big Time". In addition for being happy for Marc, I was also gleeful that
once again Penn is probably kicking itself, for not giving Marc tenure in
the early eighties. If there is one math department that I really don't like
, it is Penn's (as a whole(!), some of my best friends teach there, e.g.
Herb Wilf), whose QP (Quality/Pretension) quotient is very low (in my
opinion). Penn-Math also initially denied Vaughan Jones tenure, and once he
came up with the Jones invariant, he didn't need them (and went to UCB).
The absolute worst talk (once again, expositorily speaking) was by Gang Tian
. Here there was no room at all for productive day-dreaming. Tian's talk was
extremely technical, very dry, and the transparencies were typed with small
font, that probably made it hard to follow even for the ten or whatever
experts in the audience.
I also went to many of the invited talks. Once again, the expository quality
was variable. All the talks in Theoretical Computer Science (sec. 15) were
really excellent (Ran Raz's talk, in particular, was (probably) the absolute
best in the whole ICM, at least it was the best among the talks I went too,
counting the plenary). The Combinatorics talks were also uniformly good and
lucid. I also enjoyed very much the 3 talks on Probability (sec. 10) that I
went to, by Gerard Ben Arous, Ofer Zeitouni and Kurt Johansson. Johansson's
talk was particularly attractive to me because of the beautiful interplay
of combinatorics and probability. It was very lucid and the transparencies
were gorgeous. I was sorry that I had to miss Yuval Peres's interesting talk
, but I read the paper, and it is really exciting, so I am sure that he also
gave a great talk.
I tried to go to a random sample of talks in other fields. Eitan Tadmor's
talk, in numerical analysis (16), was, if not exciting, at least very well-
presented and lucid. Quite disappointing were the two talks in the
Mathematical Physics section (13) that looked promising from the abstracts,
by Jean-Pierre Eckmann (whose book on chaos I really love), and the
brilliant wunderkind, Nikita Nekrasov, whom I heard speak, very clearly, in
the Gelfand seminar, but whose talk was way too technical and boring.
Hugh Woodin's talk (in section 1 (Logic)) was out of this world.
Superficially it was dry and boring, yet I wasn't bored for a second,
because of the greater-than-life personality of the speaker. First, he was
dressed-to-kill (which was particularly noticeable in 2002, where even
plenary speakers are dressed like slobs). He reminded me of old-time movie
heroes like Clark Gable. He also mentioned, with great glee, "Woodin
cardinals" (to the point that he had to apologize for mentioning them so
often). So even though I hardly had a clue of what he was talking about, I
lasted almost to the end.
In the algebra section (02) I went to Zlil Sela's talk and the last part of
Cheryl Praeger's. Zlil's content was fascinating. He proved long-standing
conjectures of Alfred Tarski, but his presentation and lecture-style were
only average. On the other hand Cheryl Praeger's talk about Permutation
groups, was really tops! I would rate it second-best only slightly below Ran
Raz's. Cheryl's talk also illustrated the power of patience, since the main
result took ten years to prove! So, like Michael Hopkins, here is another
proof that you don't have to be a lousy speaker just because you are a pure
mathematician.
I also enjoyed the ad-hoc talk by Madhu Sudan on list-decoding, that was
very lucid. The public talk by John Nash was, of course, a happening, and
quite accessible, even though it was not originally intended for a general
public. Mary Poovey's public talk (Thur. evening) was extremely stimulating
and very depressing. She very eloquently made the case that the American
Capitalist "free market" society is far from perfect, and not only
statistics, but also math, can be abused in the hands of greedy crooks.
The organization was almost perfect. It would have been perfect if they had
a crossing-guard to help cross the very busy street between the hotel and
the conference. | l********e
发帖数: 3632 | | m***c
发帖数: 1177 | 3 Zeilberger是个非常nice的人，开会见过。有过e-mail来往。给他发e-mail主题上要加
“math is fun”。 跟南开的陈永川联系较密切。
【在 l********e 的大作中提到】
: 关于这个作者rutgers的人都来说说吧。。。
| C***U
发帖数: 2406 | 4 确实挺好的 发信都会回复 不认识也恢复
请教过一个组合恒等式问题
【在 m***c 的大作中提到】
: Zeilberger是个非常nice的人，开会见过。有过e-mail来往。给他发e-mail主题上要加
: “math is fun”。 跟南开的陈永川联系较密切。
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