Posted on 27th June 2022
An update of sorts. I have finally submitted my long paper "Quantum graphs: different perspectives, homomorphisms and quantum automorphisms".
We have been teaching back in person all year, and really, long may this continue. Given the sort of teaching I do, to the sort of students I teach, in person lectures seem much, much better from a continuing engagement point of view. This year I modified my first year tutorials, making them fully "flipped" and completely de-coupled from any homework. I think this worked well: students seemed more willing to experiment and collaborate when there is no "assessment" (formative or otherwise). Next we need to work on encouraging out of class work.
I wrote before about virtual seminars. I have continued to find travel difficult for a variety of reasons. As such, I have really enjoyed being able to attend various virtual seminars; let me mention the Athens Functional Analysis and Operator Algebra seminar, and the (virtual) Quantum Groups Seminar. It is hard to think that pre-pandemic, I essentially attended no seminars at all. Long may virtual things continue!
I also recently attended the Canadian Abstract Harmonic Analysis Symposium 2020 in which you can in fact see me in the zoom conference photo. I am conflicted about this:
A work in progress is to see if Mathematics can try to make virtual workshops better. I hope we don't stop trying.
Finally, LaTeX. At some point, GitHub added official support for LaTeX (using MathJax) to markdown files. You can see an example of mine here. However, it took me some time to get the simple \( \ell^\infty \) and \( \ell^1 \) to render correctly, requiring the careful addition of extra spaces in just the right place. Some details of the problems with the GitHub approach are explained by techematics. Perhaps I got lucky when I hacked together my own code which creates this blog!
Still, it is nice to be able to use GitHub with better Mathematics support. Now just to convince collaborators to use GitHub!