Earlier this month I attended Mathfest 2006, a conference sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America in Knoxville, TN. It was an interesting convention, held in the downtown area at the hotel I was staying at and at the Knoxville Convention Center, which was next door to the yellow sphere that symbolizes the World's Fair that was once held in Knoxville.
Most of the talks were on how to teach mathematics and what are the best way to teach a certain theory to the public at large. There were three talks on Sudoku, the 9x9 square craze of the past couple of years. One gave us the variations on Sudoku, another told us to some extent how to solve a Sudoku, and the third one showed how to program a computer to solve a Sudoku puzzle.
The invited addresses included an interesting one on knots, in which the presenter enumerated the types of knots there were, and gave us some knot invariants, such as the Alexander polynomial. None of these completely characterized knots; in fact the Alexander polynomial flunked tenderfoot, because it can't tell a square knot from a granny knot. Another talk was about the Yawp of Mathematics. What is Yawp? Watch the movie "Dead Poets Society" and find out. It means getting excited about finding something striking or beautiful in mathematics.
Another talked about whether 9 to the 9 to the 9 to the 9 to the 9 power or 9!!!! was bigger. The presenter asked for the biggest number with 5 symbols. I tried 9^^^9, where ^ is an up arrow, but he would not allow that type of notation and wanted to stick to ^ (exponentiation) and below. Turns out the answer is neither but rather (9 to the 9th)!!!
One section dealt with mathematics in popular culture. Now this is interesting. Popular culture is dominated by prima divas, murder cases, silly sitcoms, wardrobe malfunctions and other such highly illogical and immathematical pursuits. So how can mathematics slice through this muck? The TV show NUMB3RS helps, and one presenter analyzed the mathematics of this show. The Simpsons had one episode wherein the equation 3987^12 + 4365^12 = 4472^12 was written on the board. No, Andrew Wiles. Your proof of the Tanayama-Shimura conjecture is still intact. Note that the left side is divisible by 3 but the right isn't. One presenter showed us how to model Yoda's robe which was swinging around all over the place. It wasn't too easy. Another analyzed mathematics in movies after noting that these movies never made it to the Box Office: Math Wars, f(x)Files, Lord of the Ring of Matrices, and et, as in et phone home. Another speaker delved into mathematics and mental illness, using A Beautiful Mind and Proof as examples. He could have included Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber), and Paul Morphy (the chess genius). This is an interesting topic - is there a relationship between mathematics and mental illness, or are there enough Paul Cohens running around to disprove such a relationship?
The most interesting night was when we all went on a riverboat cruise aboard the Star of Knoxville on a stormy night, which gave us a dramatic scene of Knoxville in twilight with a severe storm's lightning in the area, and in which we got back to our hotel rooms just minutes before the storm hit.
So when am I going to another major mathematics conference? The American Mathematical Society/Mathematical Association of America conference this January is in New Orleans. How can this be? The convention area was not hit by floods, and holding a convention pumps money into an economy that desperately needs it. The convention's events will be at two large hotels, not at the infamous Convention Center. All the fixings of New Orleans, including the Vieux Carré and New Orleans jazz, will be there. So maybe that is a good convention to go to, but I will drive there if I go, even though it is a two-day drive, because of all the stuff that has been occurring on the airlines recently.
