Waffle time feelings

There's an artist I really like in Raleigh named Keith Norval.  His paintings are just so goofy and fill me with joy, like this one called "Waffle time".  "Waffle time" always cracks me up when I see it at night, especially since I love eating breakfast for dinner.  (I used to request breakfast for seminar dinner when I was a visiting speaker.)  I have a different painting of his in my apartment and whenever I look at it I giggle a bit and feel both joy and wonder.  Juanita Pinzón-Caicedo also has a great painting of his too.  

Math can fill me with these warm feelings too, in a variety of settings.  Often it's the obvious "status" gains - proving a result I'm proud of, getting a grant, being invited to hang with the cool postdocs as a grad student, etc.  But there's a lot of other things that bring meaningful feelings into my math world.  Giving pep talks and career advice to junior folks is extremely fulfilling; late nights with math friends at a conference - math or karaoke or running - brings on giggly excitement; being connected to a (mostly) caring and fun community of people makes for a wonderful work life.  When shit has hit the fan in the past, a lot of math friends have been there for me, and it's pretty special to feel connected to those people regularly.  It's really the combination of all these feelings and people that usually keeps me motivated in research math.  Like the mediocre hardcore band A Wilhelm Scream says, I knew there was a reason I got up this morning.  (People seem to identify with music references in this blog, so there's a gratuitous one.  Somehow Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" doesn't quite fit as much as I want it to.) 

Of course math comes with a number of stressors and negative feelings too - deadlines, applying for jobs, balancing a million responsibilities, wondering if you're good enough at math, and now the question of whether there will even be math research in a few years.  That can make it hard to soak in those good feelings.  Recently, I've been pretty grumpy about research mathematics.  Unsurprisingly, it's mostly stemming from all of the AI stuff.  Some unpleasantness I've had to deal with directly and some amount is the general state of how it's affecting the field.  (TBH I'm actually more worried about the apocalyptic things than how math will be affected, but that's not the scope of this blog.)  I don't want to go in to much detail here, but want to emphasize that many in the math community are greatly distraught by the current situation.  I plan to post something more concrete about dealing with AI in the future, which requires significantly more preparation, but I wanted to quickly put in writing a blog post acknowledging the difficult feelings that people are having right now in the field.  So, I just want to encourage everyone to have some empathy and understanding at this time that your colleagues might truly be in a state of despair.  (I do feel it is important for the community to dedicate serious energy to thinking through how this is all impacting math at a human level, and this is already happening significantly in some circles.  I hope to report back more on this soon.)

To end this short post on a more positive note, I'm going to ask everyone to take a moment when you have a chance to reflect on the great feelings that being a mathematician can bring you.  In fact, I think everyone could use a little giggle in their life right now.  So here's a picture of two of my favorite mathematicians experiencing math conference joy while eating breakfast for dinner.  

                                        (Jen Hom and Adam Levine in 2013, photo by Liam Watson)

Comments

  1. Juanita PinzonSeptember 9, 2026 at 8:03 PM

    I love my rhino! I had never thought about it, but it does bring me a lot of joy. Thank you boss :)

    ReplyDelete

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