hooray for thursday!

today is what i would call a success :-)

this afternoon, around lunchtime, dominique foata, a very famous combinatorialist who is visiting my advisor from france, was nice enough to give a talk just to the REUers... it went overall just fine, and i was glad he could be there.

after that i took time to eat my lunch and prepare -- scott and i ran a seminar from 3-4pm. it was actually a lot of fun. the title was "how to give a presentation"... some of them caught on though when i said "oh we'll start as soon as the other speaker gets here", and scott came in 5 minutes late... while waiting, one student commented "so is arriving fashionably late one of the habits we're supposed to be cultivating?"

partway through, it was pretty obvious that scott's talk was a farce... he did a real math presentation on some linear algebra stuff... but he started in the middle... he spent awhile talking softly facing the board and writing tiny... in the middle, i called his cell (and hung up as soon as he answered, but he talked like someone was there)... he did one proof by writing in complex notation on the board, not saying a word, but working it out slowly as he went... he did a proof "by triviality"... his phone went off again (not me)... he sat on the table up front for awhile and read them his notes like it was a poetry reading or something... his randomly called on people he knew didn't know what he was talking about... he ran out of time, and his conclusion was saying a bunch of upper level graduate class lingo to try to confuse them all

other than the students and me, chuck (our math grad director, and also an algebraist) came in and watched the talk, and when i let them ask questions, chuck and several others actually tried to stump him for fun... it was entertaining.

after 25 minutes of that, i got up front and asked "so how'd he do?... anyone want to start?"... when no one did, i had them rate scott on a scale from 1 to 5, 5 being "best talk ever", 1 being "worst talk ever"... scott gave himself a 4 for fun, one guy gave him a 3, the rest gave him 2s and 1s... going from that, i had the students make a list of "good speaking habits" and "bad speaking habits" on the board with me as scribe... then talked a little about the structure of a good talk "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell it to them, tell them what you told them"... finally, i wrapped up with some guidelines for what they should do in their talks next week, and that was that.

my job now? make the talk schedule!

anyhow, i was glad it went so well... one particularly entertaining prof (greenfield, who got the like 'best prof in the state of NJ award' this past year) commented that he's tried to do that kind of presentation before and utterly failed, and he'd be amazed if we could do so badly so as to make the students tell us so. well, HA.

now, in 10 minutes i should be walking down the street... there was a talk going on simultaneously to mine that my advisor sponsored and he invited me to dinner with the speaker... being as the restaurant is just 5 blocks from my house, i'm walking it, but should give myself a little bit of lead time to get there!

after that, scott plans to go walking with me tonight... i only went 3 miles last night on account of rain; i'm hoping tonight holds out better :-P

anyhow, my next responsibility is going on a field trip monday morning... so 3 day weekend to do my own research instead of REU stuff -- woohoo :-)

later dudes