Seminar

Last week, I suddenly realized that, for the first time since I've been here, we had no less than three geometers in the department. (Most of our people are either analysts or statisticians; algebraists are even rarer here than geometers.) One of them had mentioned "sitting down and talking geometry" to me a couple of days earlier. (The three of us do distinctly different kinds of geometry, but still....) That realization prompted me to sound them out on the possibility of establishing an informal geometry seminar - the three of us, taking turns, talking about whatever we'd been thinking about. The idea met with approval, and we've made plans to meet every other Wednesday to chat.

There's nothing remarkable about this; most math departments have all sorts of seminars going on. But this is the first time we, here, have had the critical mass to talk about my pet area.

We held the first meeting last Wednesday. I had volunteered to give the first talk, on my work on parametrizing triangles, and it went off fairly well, I think. I had mentioned the seminar to my Euclidean/non-Euclidean class, though I'd warned them of the likelihood that a lot of it would be over their heads; two bold students showed up, and one of them brought a friend.

That was fun. I'm looking forward to hearing what my colleagues choose to talk about.