Hello from AWS and Birthday!

We are in Tucson

• It’s awesome here! The weather is great, the people are nice, and it’s my Birthday!
• I actually got here last Friday, with someone from my lab. We flew together, which was fantastic, but they ended up going home today, and I will head back tomorrow. I opted to stay the extra night because tonight is the banquet, and it’s my birthday!

It’s been a blast

• Okay, so crazy unexpected thing happened and I got into a project group this time (which is quite competitive!) for the elliptic curves guy. As in, he wrote the book I studied from for my quals. And, the project had a computational element. And..best of all, it led to some really awesome results that we will definitely be writing up! Not only that, but we ended up getting a lot of interest, a lot of questions after our presentation, and even Mazur told us that our presentation “was beautiful”. If that is not a great birthday, I don’t know what is! Also, Drew Sutherland, who helped us parallelize some of our code in Magma (we started in a mix of Sage and Magma, but ended up doing the core of our computation used for the presentation on Magma) was also really intrigued!
• Mazur also suggested some other things we could look into as well, and we had a line of people afterwards with questions. So it’s exciting work! Also, the process was quite enjoyable; Silverman didn’t end up making it but really stuck with us and met with us online and was quite responsive and helpful! We even got a cool story that we weaved into our presentation about Tate and Coates that he sent to us in passing via an email.
• Our group worked every night until midnight, and even had a walk to the 24-hour CVS around the corner to get ice cream after midnight. It was really a memorable time. Our mentors were wonderful, and it was just a fun time!
• I’ll definitely have to post some of the group photos our team took. It was such an epic time.

I was thinking about what someone said

• I’ve been thinking about how much interest I’ve gotten being in Mathematics. In Computer Science, there wasn’t (imo) as much interest (quite frankly, “they” (the systemic structure / organizations / people with power in that system) were happy to waste my time on having me be some kind of political token diversity muppet of a student while offering little to no support for what I actually came to grad school to accomplish; even so far as to not acknowledge work that came from me and straight up giving it to other students and using their power to promote those people, trying to get me to support everyone else while getting no support, etc, so basically everyone gets to use me as a ladder for their career, while blatantly insulting me to my face (have you ever had anyone laugh at you in your face and tell you you are stupid, or “not serious”, or that you only get things because they are the things no one wants? Because if not, you’ve been exempt somehow from the toxic travesty that is Computer Science culture at the academic research level in garbage environments.
• I eventually learned that this is just abuse, awful and I didn’t have to take it, and I started pushing back, which is hilarious (and often unexpected, because they usually think you will just sit there and take it, because I just stopped caring, and eventually found better spaces in Maths and Quantum. The whole “not as technical” vibe is a lie, too (it’s a trope that is deliberately pushed to make people like myself accept lower positions, with less pay). A plus of being in the Maths community is seeing HOW MANY women there are here; they’re excellent, their work is super rigorous and they can run rings around lots of “CS dudes with hubris”; not even kidding. One such example is seeing a dude who had never taken a single basic Graph Theory class act like they could teach me graph theory, when I’ve taken about seven grad level classes so far lol)).
• But there seems to be something about the things I am interested in and my skillset that is appealing to the Maths people, and I remember my Maths advisor saying that the other day, when I was applying for something and trying to decide if I should pick Maths or Computer Science for reviewers. Her response was “Maths, because I think they would find it interesting”.
• That’s been in the back of my mind for a bit, because I’ve generally been hired by Mathematicians, they saw potential in me early on (even before grad school), and seem to work with them easily, and am having a lot of fun doing that. I’ve also most recently also been working with some physicists, but the core of people I work with on projects are Mathematicians, which is interesting. I’ve honestly never felt more at home, and productive.
• They’ve also just been more supportive of me as a budding professional. You can hear how much they want me to succeed when they come up to me and say “this is your time; the senior members should be doing X other work”, or, most recently before our presentation, Professor Bell said “I hope you’re speaking during the presentation tomorrow! You better speak!” (haha; of course I did!). They’ve invested so much into me in a way I’ve been proud of; I’m a stronger researcher because of my time deliberately working with this peer group moreso than that of the Computer Science community. They hold me accountable in a way I’ve never experienced in my own original discipline, which I think is the most honest way of saying systemically that they care. I know that the Mathematics community isn’t perfect, and there are tradeoffs, but to me that is authentic.
• Also, I think that my Maths advisor’s point is an interesting point to make, which a labmate and I were talking about the other day; the previous community they were showing their work to was kind of like “okay, meh”, but they suddenly interacted with another, and they were fascinated by their work. That can be difficult to find, especially as a grad student, but it really is the case that one can find a community that is adjacent to (or even, not so much adjacent to) one’s direct field, and find that they derive a lot of value from what you can bring to the table. Somewhere you can have a conversation, collaborate, and it’s just full of energy and there are just so many sparks of ideas to try things out. For me right now, that is Maths. There are some really fascinating intersections and blending of various topics and turning things on their head that is just super cool.
• It reminded me of the first time I attended NeurIPS and got to chat briefly with Professor Bouman from Caltech, who was quite in the spotlight because of the black hole image. I remember she said to me that whatever I choose, to take the time to really sit with that community, to be a part of it. I never forgot that, and even though I do bounce around, the Maths community is, I think, the place where I feel at home. Even if I’m always the only weirdo who happens to be actually in Computer Science lol. At this point, I am, but I might as well not be lol.
• Anyways, I’m learning a lot, but I feel really valued working with them, and I am busy. I keep running into people who are working on things, wanting to know if a collaboration might be possible. All in all, I’m super thankful also, and hope that I can give back to this wonderful community that has brought me so much joy in grad school.

Here are some photos

• A Commutative Algebra conference coming up.

• The group presentations were all amazing. It was really great that everyone supported each other, too.

• Yes, there were memes. Sven (also a member of our group!) had an incredible number of really great ones that made us laugh.

• This year’s topic.

• From my mom. I saw it while we were still working on our presentation in the wee morning. Just after midnight, my group realized it was also my birthday and we stopped to say Happy Birthday!

• My mom’s words to me. Really awesome.

• From my labmate. I’m opening it this evening!

• The people at the tea shop were so used to seeing me they started recommending teas I might like and just gave me some to try. I came for one cup and left with three!

• Next year’s topic. Interestingly, I’m currently part of a Group Representation Theory study group that runs weekly online.

• Andy receives a thank you book signed by us on 25 years of AWS.

• Mazur gave an awesome set of lectures!

• Silverman giving lectures.

• Drew wanting us to come to MIT this year.

• More MIT things. I’m interning this summer so probably won’t be able to make it.

• Joel Silverbear, as he was called lol. It was kind of an inside joke because when I was drawing up the slides (which were apparently a hit; one teammate said that they “never wanted to write anything again” after they saw my penmanship, which is really just the result of taking too many hand-drafting classes with vellum in undergrad), I accidentally said “Joel Silverman”. So we decided that that was Silverman’s alter-ego, who is a bear. Then I found out I wasn’t the only one and apparently someone else had mistakenly also called Silverman “John”. So then I drew a cowboy and said that was Silverman’s cowboy alter-ego, and we had a good laugh about it. Hopefully he doesn’t read this (lol). Oh, and Sutherland came up to my friend because he was really interested in his computational algorithmic approach and was chatting with him, and at the end, my friend in my group goes “who are you again?” and we laughed as he realized who he was talking to; the Sutherland. These things happen, I guess. They were all good sports about it.

• Rachel had some 3D printed glasses that read “mod p” that she brought out during lectures.

• My new friend who got to try on Silverman’s name tag on the first day (they then gave it to the bear).

• Bear falling asleep in lectures on the first day!

• View from our window in the mornings.

• Reunited and it feels so good!

• So beautiful! They remind me of the wild west, or the painting of Thomas Cole’s “The Oxbow” and the Hudson River School paintings we looked at in Undergrad Art History class. I think in my heart, the allure of the American West is this place of being able to run free, try new things, and to reimagine. It’s probably why I ran away from the East Coast early on, and imo the West Coast is still the best coast lol.

• Project Silverman group 3.

• Vegan dinner for the banquet.

• Bubbly.

• Dessert. I walked around in the evening afterwards and discovered that my middle name is also a word in Turkish, apparently. I had a falafel and a group of people were going to karaoke, and some others ended up going to a burlesque show, but I had already done laundry, so I didn’t feel like coming back with a jacket smelling of booze. That being said, I had a fun time chatting with some Berkeley Maths students along the way. Their flight apparently got switched for some really early morning flight because their original one got cancelled.

So how does it feel to be one year older?

• I guess, thrilling. I’m so happy to have been here to share it with some of my favourite people, in a place with fresh guacamole, the largest cacti and prickly pear tea. I’m excited to see what’s next and for future collaborations.
• Oh, and there’s a Discord bot for a server I’m on that spits out random things if you tell it your birthday ahead of time. I liked mine: very Ren-faire…. “Huzzah! On this joyous occasion, let us raise our goblets high in honor of (me)! May the festivities be as grand as a royal banquet in the great halls of a medieval castle! And what better way to commemorate this special day than with a feast fit for a knight, complete with savory tacos overflowing with delicious fillings! Let us partake in the merriment and revelry, for today is a day to celebrate the brilliance and splendor of (meeee)!” I especially liked that somehow they knew I was in a place with access to good tacos!

And that’s it.