Travels, 12

We piled into the two cars and headed north to the World Heritage city of Évora for the third conference on Theoretical and Computational Algebra. Arriving in my room, the welcome message on the television informed me that the temperature was 42 degrees, although it was late afternoon. This kind of temperature lasted for the first two days of the conference, after which it cooled down to the upper 30s only.

This was maybe the best algebra conference I have ever attended, with lots of really interesting talks. But it is difficult for me to write about it, since it was dedicated to me, and I am not good at self-advertisement. Indeed, during the conference I suffered from impostor syndrome: I haven’t done anything special, I am no better than anything else, why is everybody making such a fuss?

I will try to write dispassionately about the conference later. Here I just want to say two things: first, a huge thank you to the organisers (and especially to João) for the immense amount of work they put in; and second, to describe the physical situation of the conference.

I was in Évora once before, in 2018, when João took us there. It is a city whose roots precede the Romans, but they were here, and left several impressive remains including a temple of Venus. Another highlight is a chapel of bones (human bones and skulls are used in the construction, supposedly to remind us of our mortality).

The University is ancient, having been founded by the Jesuits in 1559, and functioned for 200 years until Portugal expelled the Jesuits. In the 1970s it re-opened with (as far as I can tell) a focus on business and management. But the old lecture halls still exist, and the treasure they contain is a huge collection of azulejos (Portuguese blue-and-white tiles), halfway up the walls all the way round the room.

One of these gave me the subject of my talk. It is in the Metaphysical Philosophy hall, and shows a cherub or putto holding up a banner reading “SEMPER ABSTRACTA”. Good slogan for a mathematician (the power of our subject comes from abstraction, since our results can apply in a wide variety of circumstances), but things are a little more complicated than that, as I tried to show. (If you are interested in what I said, the slides are in the usual place.) Another shows the 1654 experiment by Otto von Guericke where he took two hemispheres and pumped the air out, and teams of horses were unable to pull them apart, thereby demonstrating the strength of atmospheric pressure.

The moment when it was really brought home to me that the conference was a great success occurred after the talk by Maria Elisa Fernandes. Immediately after the talk, I saw her with Dimitri Leemans, Colva Roney-Dougal and Scott Harper on the stage, talking excitedly, and I knew that a new collaboration was being forged.

Another exciting moment was after the Zoom talk by Misha Volkov, when the audience rose and gave him a standing ovation.

The organisers were very generous to me. Among other things, including the poem by JoAnne Growney, they gave me an illustrated book about the azulejos in the lecture halls (from which I learned that apparently metaphysical philosophy has to be done in a deserted wilderness – unlike mathematics!) and many many messages from coauthors, colleagues, students and friends.

What an event! You will not be surprised to learn that, back in my hotel room after the conference finished, I could feel the adrenalin draining away, like air from a balloon.