This week I am at a conference in Oberwolfach. Oberwolfach is a funny place; it is conference centre devoted only to mathematics, in a rather remote valley in the Black Forest.
It is a fulfilment of a widely-shared mathematician's fantasy--- an isolated place with few distractions from mathematics, a large group of interested colleagues, large amounts of food served regularly, an excellent library and lecture hall, no distractions from family, discreet staff who clean up after them and so on. Monasticism without deprivation.
(This is someone else's photo from earlier in the year- now the trees are fully-leaved).
It has fixed traditions. A bell is rung for meals. Your name is assigned to a random table at every meal time. There are five meals a day (breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, supper).
Wednesday afternoons are reserved for a hike up the mountain. You must sign the visitors book, where you may also write down current open problems. You must hand-write a short description of your talk in another book (I have the job of conference reporter; it is my responsibility to make sure that this is done, and also to compile a printed report from the whole conference).
This afternoon I realised what a perfect place for an Agatha Christie-type Krimi it would be; the isolated setting, the different rooms (the Music Room, the Computer Room, the Journals Room, the Pingpong Room...), the choice of murder weapons (um, the large volume on geometric measure theory, the other big book about K theory... OK, not so exciting choice of weapons), the ambitious and sometimes competitive atmosphere...
On the last point, even though I think mathematicians are often not ambitious with respect to money or position (beyond getting a permanent position with not too much dull teaching), they are sometimes extremely competitive with respect to getting credit for their work. I notice on tomorrow's list of talks that there are two talks, directly after each other, announcing exactly the same result. Rumour has it that one of the speakers had been working on the problem for a long time, but the other one published first. We are looking forward to some excitement.
This has shades of the famous Leibniz-Newton priority dispute, about who invented the calculus first. It is fairly clear that Newton discovered it first, but did not publish it. Leibniz published it first, but much later, and probably after he knew that Newton had done something similar. It is unclear whether Leibniz copied, but I think it was unfair of Newton not to publish for so long (maybe 20 years) after he had done it.
Interestingly, Leibniz's formulation was much more practical and useful, and is more used today.
As you can see in the photo, the Institut is surrounded by forest; this evening I went for a little walk and discovered that it is called the Black Forest due to the extremely dark bark of the fir trees. Or that is my theory, anyway.
Much love,
Julie.
