Travels, 6

The next four days were devoted to the International Conference on Discrete Mathematics (ICDM25), at CUSAT in Kochi. Of course, it is virtually impossible to write up a detailed diary while at a very intense conference, and it takes a little while to digest the mathematics presented. So I am writing this account some days after the event, and I will not discuss the mathematics. I hope to return to that later.

The pattern was rather simple: each morning we were collected from the hotel at around 9:00 (breakfast was available at the conference but we had breakfast in the hotel before leaving) and delivered to the conference venue, the Seminar Complex on the CUSAT campus. Then lunch was provided, and at the (rather late) end of the conference, dinner was provided, then somebody (usually Vijay) took us back to the hotel.

There werre three different types of lectures to the whole conference audience: plenary lectures (of which mine was one), memorial foundation lectures commemorating specific mathematicians, and invited lectures; their lengths were decreasing in the order I have given.

The first day began with an opening ceremony. Vijay had asked me to contribute to this, and I saw on the paper schedule that I was giving a “keynote address”. So I welcomed people to Kerala, “God’s own country” (I knew already that I had been to Kerala more times than some of the delegates), and encouraged them to cast the net of what constitutes discrete mathematics more widely. I believe that the best division of mathematics, if you have to make one, is not pure/applied, but discrete/continuous, with a number of impportant bridges between them (for example, spectra of self-adjoint operators/real symmetric matrices).

After Vijay’s presidential address, I had the job of introducing Rajendra Pawale to give the first Shrikhande memorial lecture. I mentioned that Shrikhande’s mathematical family includes not only his teacher and students, but also his real family (his son Mohan is a mathematician, and closely collaborated with Sharad Sane, whose first student was Pawale).

In the evening we had talks by contestants for the paper prize. There had been 100 entrants, who had been whittled down to 20 by the committee; each was given ten minutes. So the final two hours of the conference were an extreme feat of concentration. My observation was that young people giving short talks tend to make two mistakes: assuming that everybody knows everything (and so not giving the audience enough time to read and assimilate the definitions), and trying to compress years of PhD work into ten minutes rather than deciding what is really important and concentrating on that.

On the second day I gave my lecture (which started a little late and so became slightly compressed). In the evening (as on the third day) there were four parallel sessions. One was in the main hall in the seminar complex, and the other three in the Mathematics Department a little distance away; so it was impossible to swap sessions midstream, and sufficient of an obstacle for Rosemary that we stuck to the first stream.

The third day was a little different for us, as Rosemary had been asked to give a talk to relatively senior pupils at a nearby school. She told them about her experience of a life in mathematics (to make the point that life brings unexpected choices but a degree in mathematics often helps to face them) and then had a number of questions and discussions with the students.

Meanwhile, back at the conference, we had the Conference photograph. Everyone traipsed downstairs into a little courtyard with flowering bushes, and the photographer stood on a roof overlooking us and shouted instructions in Malayalam.

After Rosemary returned, Aparna’s student Midhuna Ajith asked for a photo with us, and brought along the conference photographer Albin James. He took several pictures, and then suggested that we go outside to where the conference photo had been taken. Owing largely to his skill as a photographer, the pictures gradually turned from posed to natural shots and we ended up with some very high-quality (and high-resolution) pictures of ourselves, separately or together, talking and laughing or admiring the flowers or finally walking away up the road to the front door.

In the evening, we had the cultural session, a bit over an hour of traditional Kerala dance. Beautiful and impressive stuff; the dancer (whose name I didn’t catch, but it seems she is also a very promising chemistry student who is off to the next Heidelberg Laureate Forum) used not just her body and limbs, but her fingers (she could make them vibrate very fast as if they were kalimba keys; I have no idea how this is done), her face, even her eyes. It seemed like a combination of dance, mime, and acting.

After her first performance, we had a treat. It seems there is a tradition that the conference organiser performs at the cultural event. So in came Aparna in dancer’s costume and gave us a very good performance. She said it was something she had not done for some time, but I thought it was really up to scratch; she was not shamed by the extremely good dancer putting on most of the show.

The fourth day was only a half day, with no parallel sessions. After the last talk, we had a Graph Theory Day event (commemorating the birthday of Professor E. Sampathkumar, who delivered the first lecture course on graph theory in India), and then the valedictory event for the conference. This last was the only event of the whole meeting that was seriously delayed, since we had to wait for the Vice-Chancellor.

I was asked to make some remarks in the ceremony (after the VC had left, fortunately). I felt I had to give some advice to the presenters of short talks, so I asked them to consider carefully whether they had communicated as much as the dancer did in ten minutes of her performance, and added a few words of advice on giving a short talk.

And then it was all over.

My time, when not in formal sessions, was completely taken up with the many studdents and young researchers who wanted to discuss mathematics with me. I am afraid that I didn’t always do a good job, since my brain capacity was already taken up with processing what I had just heard. In many cases, all I could do was encourage them to send me a copy of their work so that I could think about it, and apologise that this will not get done for a while. And, inevitably, they all wanted a photo with me, or maybe a selfie. I don’t believe I ever had so many pictures of myself taken. Fortunately, the vast majority didn’t send the pictures to me, or my email would have been completely swamped. But I do have six or eight folders with work to think about when quieter times return.