Blogging the JMM: Thursday
By Robert Jacobson
The best part of the Joint Meetings is networking with like-minded people. I ran into many old friends and colleagues. Today (Thursday) several math bloggers and Google+‘ers organized an impromptu meeting for lunch. I stuck a sign on the message board inviting other math bloggers to join us, and a cohort of tumblr bloggers discovered it and joined us. Such is the power of the JMM message board.
These are the people who could make it.
- Me, Robert Jacobson, owner of the Mathematics and Mathematics Research communities on Google+ and author of this blog.
- Peter Krautzberger, MathJax evangelist and Google+‘er who blogs at http://boolesrings.org/krautzberger.
- Dana Ernst, Google+‘er and blogger who writes for Math Ed Matters, a blog about inquiry based learning sponsored by the MAA. Dana also has a personal math blog at http://danaernst.com.
- Robert Talbert, Google+‘er and author of Casting Out Nines, a blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog network.
- Brendan Speth, a math blogger on tumblr, contributor to http://whatilearninmath.tumblr.com.
- Layra Idaranti, Google+‘er.
- Hilary, Google+‘er and tumblr blogger at http://whatilearninmath.tumblr.com.
- Jesse Han, tumblr blogger at http://eatsleepmath.tumblr.com and author of the blog http://nonesequiturs.wordpress.com.
- Henry Segerman, Google+‘er, mathematical artist, and youtubist who is also on the web here: http://www.segerman.org.
We talked about Google+ and mathematics and academia and blogging. I loved my conversation with the graduate/undergraduate students in the group about mathematics and language. It reminded me a lot of the Mathematics Community’s Hangout On Air from last November.
Sometimes the best interactions are completely spontaneous. While waiting to talk to William Stein about Sage, I had a great conversation with his student Aly Deines comparing and contrasting complex analysis and number theory. And David Lippman, developer for IMathAS, happened to be talking with Peter Krautzberger when I was asking about technologies for communicating mathematics on the web. David had some very helpful things to share with me.
It’s fun to meet “famous” math people, too. In previous years, I got to meet Marvin Minsky, Steven Wolfram, Steven Krantz, Gerald Folland, and some other well known figures in the mathematics community. I wonder who I’ll meet this year.