Travels, 10

Nearly ten years ago, I spent a month in the town of Aveiro, in Portugal. It was a very intense, hard-workking month; with Maria Elisa Fernandes and Dimitri Leemans, I was working towards what we named the “Aveiro Theorem”, which gave the maximal rank of an abstract regular polytope whose automorphism group is an alternating group of given degree.

Now I was back on a related mission, as a member of the jury for Maria Elisa’s aggregation. I am still not completely sure what aggregation means in this context; something between habilitation and promotion, I think.

We woke in the Hotel Jardim (the same hotel that I stayed in last time). I looked out the window to see cloudless sky, a tree laden with oranges, a Norfolk pine just peeping over the rooftops, and felt really happy to be back.

I was fetched by Uwe Kaehler, a local member of the jury (and someone whose cynicism perhaps exceeds my own) in time for the start of the event at 10:00. It was in three parts, each consisting of a presentation by the candidate followed by questions from the jury. In the morning, the first two parts were CV and teaching porfolio. These are things which everyone can have a view about, and she was questioned closely.

Lunch was provided for us, an excellent buffet.

After lunch, it was the research presentation, which concentrated on her very fine work on regular polytopes with symmetric or alternating automorphism groups. It was my job to ask questions on this, which I was able to do since I know the work rather well.

Then the jury retired to consider the result. The chair first asked us to vote, and the result was unanimous acceptance. After that, various jury members had to make comments, which I will not report.

One issue that was raised concerned me; I believe I can discuss the general principle without breaking confidentiality. A mathematician of today is expected to lead a team, run a seminar, get big grants, and so on; someone who hasn’t done this is marked down. Surely enough examples are in full view of cases where this does not apply (perhaps Andrew Wiles and Grigori Perelman the best-known examples). There is also the question of balance between publishing many papers and publishing really substantial papers.

I don’t think I have seen a happier smile than Maria Elisa’s when the result was announced. In the evening, she took Gracinda Gomes and me and our partners to a very nice fish restaurant, Casa Nostra, where we had grilled sea bass, and super desserts.

Then back to the hotel.

The next morning, I tried to buy train tickets to Lisbon on-line. But the combination of the weak wi-fi signal in the hotel and the extremely slow response of Comboios de Portugal made this quite impossible. So I walked to the station and bought the tickets in person.

I wanted to show Rosemary at least a small amount of one of my favourite Portuguese towns. So we walked down the steps to the river, and along beside the river into the centre of town, where we stopped for a light lunch, and then back along the road to the hotel. The clue for turning down the right side street was a tall Norfolk pine which I had seen from the hotel room.

Back to the hotel, we did a small amount of repacking, and then took a taxi to the station, where we had time to look at the wonderful azulejos before going in and waiting for the train.

The trip did not start well. Our tickets had coach and seat numbers on them, but there was no indication on the platform about where to stand, and no members of staff that we could ask. We positioned ourself near the middle of the platform, but on boarding we found ourselves in Coach 21, and needed to get to Coach 25. To make things much worse, the doors between coaches in the rickety old train were almost impossible to open (at one point we nearly gave up in despair), and if you let go of them for a moment they closed with such force that we risked serious injury. To add to the problem, the track was in poor space, and the ride very rough while we were trying to negotiate the narrow passage through four coaches.

Eventually we reached our seats, right at the back of the train. Things were OK from that point, except that João had offered to pick us up in Lisbon, and the wi-fi signal was so weak that we didn’t know whether he had received my message about the expected time of arrival in Oriente. (The train was actually going to Santa Apolonia, but at least I knew enough to get out at Oriente.)

We descended from the train and Rosemary found a toilet on the platform. Before she had finished, João had arrived and our worries were over.

He took us to the hotel, loaded up with enough foor that we didn’t need to go out again, but could just subside exhausted to bed.