JAN 10, 2026

wweknote 2026-01

drinking from the math hose

Happy week 1 of 2026!^[1]

This week was an intense but welcome dive back into mathematics.

what happened?

I attended the Joint Mathematics Meeting, and presented my research there! Meeting a lot of like-minded people was fun and motivating, and I came out with more mathematical energy and ideas. (Though, definitely not physical energy. I was wiped out.)
School started back up, so there was a lot of shuffling of schedules and catching up on what I missed out on. Some projects that I had to put down in the Fall came back to me, which is very exciting!
I started applying for jobs and other things to do next year. Kindly ping me if you know of anything interesting.

I’m almost done with Season 2 of Culinary Class Wars. I like it and there are more chefs that I know of in this season, but there is something about the production that is throwing me off. I’ve heard that Netflix has been encouraging producers to make shows easier to watch while multitasking, and I’m wondering if that’s what’s happening here. The narrator explains the rules so many times that it becomes annoying, and too much of the contestant dialogue is just explaining the current state of the game. But other than that, a fun watch.
Cate Hall’s article about burnout hit home, and the model she uses is extremely aligned with things I’ve learned in the last couple of months. But more on that another time.

Redeyes are terrible. Never again.
There exist people who clap when the plane lands, which I learned on the flight back from (the?) JMM. I fly quite frequently, so there has to have been another time where I encountered this, but I can’t recall the last time this happened, so….
Preserving your love of the game is the most important part of being good at the game.