{"id":30033,"date":"2020-08-08T09:08:41","date_gmt":"2020-08-08T14:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=30033"},"modified":"2020-08-08T09:08:41","modified_gmt":"2020-08-08T14:08:41","slug":"dissing-your-colleagues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/08\/08\/dissing-your-colleagues\/","title":{"rendered":"Dissing Your Colleagues"},"content":{"rendered":"

NewScientist<\/strong><\/em> (5 August 2020, paywall) interviews<\/a> post-doc mathematician Lisa Piccirillo, who solved the Conway knot question concerning slicing<\/a> in a week, concerning why she became a mathematician, and what it takes:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The decision to go to graduate school was a difficult one. I still had this idea that I think a lot of people have, which is that the only way to be a successful mathematician is to be a genius, and I\u2019m certainly not anything like that. So I thought: \u201cWhy bother? I\u2019m never going to be that good.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a strong\u00a0stereotype of what people who do maths are like<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 introverted, nerdy, probably male, probably dead \u2013 and I was none of those things. I was very worried that I would have to give up other aspects of myself to be a maths robot and I didn\u2019t want to do that. I felt that tension very acutely in my undergraduate programme, but in graduate school, I learned that this tension isn\u2019t real. Mathematicians are interesting humans and none of them are geniuses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh, ouch. I’ll bet there were some hurt feelings over that one. But Piccirillo has her revenge on me just for writing this post:<\/p>\n

NewScientist<\/strong><\/em>: What will you be working on next?<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019m still very interested in 4-manifolds and in using sliceness to understand them better. It\u2019s also true that this trick I used for the Conway knot doesn\u2019t work on some other, more complicated knots. The reason is because it isn\u2019t always possible to build a trace \u2013 sometimes it\u2019s provably impossible or we just don\u2019t know how to do it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to understand how to apply this type of argument more broadly to sliceness problems. More concretely, it turns out that sometimes, for some special knots, I can go home and build you another knot that shows a trace, but a\u00a0computer<\/a>\u00a0can\u2019t. Why not? It\u2019s because we don\u2019t know the rules of how we do it ourselves. If the maths gods hand me a knot and ask me to build a trace, I may get lucky, but I don\u2019t know if I could tell you how I got there. And I\u2019d like to understand why.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Concerning a trace: All knots have something called a trace, which is the manifold you can build from that knot<\/em>. And a manifold?<\/p>\n

In\u00a0mathematics<\/a>, a\u00a0manifold<\/b>\u00a0is a\u00a0topological space<\/a>\u00a0that locally resembles\u00a0Euclidean space<\/a>\u00a0near each point. More precisely, an\u00a0n<\/span>-dimensional manifold, or\u00a0n<\/span>-manifold<\/i>\u00a0for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a\u00a0neighborhood<\/a>\u00a0that is\u00a0homeomorphic<\/a>\u00a0to the Euclidean space of dimension\u00a0n<\/span>. [Wikipedia<\/strong><\/a>]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, that’s just a digression. My actual interest is in her statement … If the maths gods hand me a knot and ask me to build a trace, I may get lucky, but I don\u2019t know if I could tell you how I got there<\/em>. That just leaves me hanging, being a software engineer and all. She doesn’t know how? What? Then how does she know the trace properly derives from the knot? Given a trace, is there a trapdoor function that reveals the knot to which it corresponds?<\/p>\n

Augh!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NewScientist (5 August 2020, paywall) interviews post-doc mathematician Lisa Piccirillo, who solved the Conway knot question concerning slicing in a week, concerning why she became a mathematician, and what it takes: The decision to go to graduate school was a difficult one. I still had this idea that I think \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30035,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30033\/revisions\/30035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}