Symmetry breaking.

I got this a couple of days ago. Yesterday’s rain has washed away all the snow.

Thursday’s Child

Never mind that it’s actually Tuesday. I was really in the mood for this.

A brief guide to a full professor’s administrative work

Administrative and service work is the black hole that consumes a huge proportion of our working time but is pretty much invisible to everyone else. Typically, postdocs only get a small taste of it when they write their first grant applications. Assistant professors tend to have limited service assignments. Then you get promoted to associate and then full professor, start supervising graduate students, become better known in the community so there is more demand for your time, and administrative work starts creeping up on you until you almost function like a small business. That’s how it felt to me, anyway, and I’ve found in talking with actual small business owners that we do have a lot in common.

I’m writing this mostly for students and postdocs contemplating an academic career, just so they know what they’re getting into. It’s not all about working quietly in your office, sheltered from the business realities of “real life”. If that’s what you expect, be warned that you might not get it. If on the other hand you enjoy working with people and find the gloomy ivory tower cliches unappealing, I can reassure you that they bear no resemblance to my own work.

Before someone gets on the “LOL professors complain” soapbox: I do a lot of this work on a voluntary basis. I enjoy much of it. That doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about how easily “research-related activities” can drive out actual research if we let them, or what we do to maintain a balance. Nor does it have to stop us from speculating on how the system might evolve and which way we would like to push it.

Sunset over Fraser River

I’ve had interesting feedback on my last post, here and in a couple of other places. It’s pretty clear that a few points could use a more detailed treatment, and I’ll try to do that in follow-up posts. I’m thinking of administrative/service work first, then (as time permits) the evolution of university teaching, the differences between mathematics and other fields of science, and the reasons why academic jobs look pretty much the same everywhere in the U.S. and Canada. I might think of more later.

Meanwhile, if you need a break (and who doesn’t?), here are a couple of photos from last weekend. (Click on the picture for the full-size image.)

The state of the profession

There’s plenty of talk about the crisis in higher education. Countless books, articles and blog posts have professed the deterioration of college education and blamed it, for the most part, on the faculty who don’t care about the students. Instead, we spend most of the academic year on research, then take a nice long vacation over the summer.

I would have a different story to tell, and then a mental exercise to suggest.

There are indeed many of us who have made research our lives’ work. We’re in it for the challenge and the pleasure of discovery, for the outlet that it provides to our creativity. That’s why we ended up in academia in the first place. We’re good at research and we’ve demonstrated this to everyone’s satisfaction.

And yet, a full professor at a large research university in the U.S. or Canada often has to work a full-time job, 40 hours a week or close to it, before any research gets done. We spend that time on teaching, writing grant proposals, supervising graduate students and postdocs, serving on committees, attending faculty meetings (here, attendance at promotion and tenure meetings is mandatory), editorial work, refereeing, writing evaluations and reference letters, and more. Much of it (calculus teaching, many committees) is completely unrelated to research. Some tasks (refereeing, various evaluation exercises) call for the scholarly expertise we’ve gained in the course of our work as researchers, and some (grant proposals) are quite directly related to that work, but writing about research and actually doing it are two different things.

The time we have left for research while classes are in session amounts, essentially, to evenings and weekends. (The actual schedule may vary: we may carve out a weekday afternoon or two for research meetings, then prepare for classes after hours instead.) Maintaining a quality research program requires a good deal of time, preferably in long uninterrupted blocks. From the time classes start to the end of the final exams, we’re, for the most part, dead to the rest of the world.

Happy holidays.

Who needs Christmas lights when there’s sun and raindrops.

Fall in Vancouver

This time, somewhat higher resolution.

Steve Jobs on curiosity and intuition

Via Jim Colliander, here’s the latest opinion piece on innovation from Dean Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Business at U of T:

In the wake of the tragically premature demise of Steve Jobs, it seems appropriate to ask: What can Canada learn about innovation from the career of Steve Jobs? I think there are two important lessons that we could take away.

The first lesson is that commercial success and impact is more about innovation than about invention. Invention is the creation of some new-to-the-world technology, molecule, material, or formula. It is typically the product of the curiosity of a scientist. It can be pretty earth-shattering when it is electricity or insulin. But it can be pretty irrelevant when it is a technology in search of a user.

Rotman’s recommendation, then, is to overhaul the traditional K-12 curriculum and “become the first nation on the planet to have universal education in innovation by explicitly and clearly teaching innovation in the primary and secondary school system.”

Well… let’s hear from Mr. Jobs himself, shall we? From the Stanford commencement address (emphasis mine):

And 17 years later I did go to college. [...] And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example. Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

(Full transcript here in comments.)

I guess there are all kinds of important lessons to be learned from this.

Random thoughts on publishing and the internet

I doubt that there is anyone reading this blog who does not also read Tim Gowers, but in case you missed it, here’s his blog post proposing a hypothetical alternative publishing model in mathematics: essentially, a massive website combining the functionality of arXiv, Math Overflow, and more. There is also a revised (mostly scaled down) version, where the website would mostly serve as a venue for exchanging constructive feedback.

I’m old enough to remember the days when most math departments had pre-printed postcards with requests for journal offprints. (“Dear Professor [fill in the blank], I would be most grateful if you could send me an offprint of your article [fill in the blank] that has appeared in [fill in the blank]“. That’s what the offprints were for, mostly. They also looked much better than a manuscript typed on a mechanical typewriter, with handwritten math symbols.) Scientific journals actually served to disseminate information back then – checking new issues in the reading room was an important part of keeping up with recent developments. Ah, the good old times.

Dissemination is in our own hands now. I usually check the arXiv every day, but it’s been years since I last bothered with the current journals in the library, other than to look up published versions of papers that I’d already seen as preprints. Of course we will want to take ownership of the rest of the publishing process: the record-keeping, the peer review with its twin goals of debugging papers and evaluating their merit. These are functions that are worth keeping. I do use the library on a regular basis for older articles; I’d rather cite a stable, debugged journal article (where possible) than a preprint that could get replaced or pulled down tomorrow; and, as inaccurate as it can be to judge papers by the journals they appear in, I’d rather have such (approximate) marks of the quality of my work in place than leave it to each year’s departmental committee on merit pay increases to try to figure out all over again what I’m doing and why it’s supposed to be important.

It’s clear enough that any alternative publishing model will likely be internet-based, with interactive components possibly similar to Math Overflow or blog comment sections. It has also been noted that women have significantly less visible presence on MO than they do in research mathematics overall. One might ask, therefore, whether switching to an internet forum-based model of publishing could have the side effect of alienating women mathematicians and driving them out of the field.

Question of the day

Why doesn’t anyone seem to feel that way about math?