Posted on 21st September 2022
Spending unexpected time in Poznan airport, after a cancelled flight. I have been at the Noncommutative harmonic analysis and quantum groups conference at Bedlewo palace, postponed at least once due to Covid, most recently from last year.
The conference was good, in the round. I have gotten out of the habit of travel, at least in part due to Covid, and had initially not planned to attend in person. I am trying to be more open to new experiences (to say yes to things a bit more, and perhaps say no to some other things). And, cancelled flight not withstanding, travelling in person was a good thing. I got to catch up with some people I knew already, and a chance to meet some new people. The talks were good. Even the conference outing, kayaking on the river- another chance to say yes to something I would not normally do so- was different, fun, if frustratingly hard to do well.
Having a conference in an isolated venue seemed like a good choice. You are forced into spending time with people you don't know. When in a city, oftentimes you spend the whole time with people you already know, which is perhaps not quite the point. It was also nice to go for walks and a run in the woods, sighting of wild boar aside!
I was the last attendee to leave, and in the downtime, spent some time organising my PDF paper collection. Over the last few years, perhaps since returning to academia, I have spent a lot of time reading preprints and papers, and have collected a vastly longer "to read" list. In a similar vein, I referee a lot, perhaps 10-15 times more than I publish. I have this sense that I need to stop this.
Oliver Burkleman's 4000 weeks has much to say on this, but it is nicely summed up in his blog post What if you never sort your life out?. I want to read all of the literature to make sure that I understand it all. To an extent this works- I felt that I followed most of the conference talks, and felt that I understood properly something of many of them. But what is the end point in all this? Even if one's goal is simply, only, to understand higher mathematics (and I do not share this goal) there is simply too much: where does one stop?
I am not doing as much of my own research as I would like, and I am not writing as much of that up as I'd like. I have fallen into this trap of believing that if I just read everything, just finally understood it all, then somehow things would be better.
Of course, knowing everything is both impossible, and wouldn't actually make the agonisingly slow, one step forwards, half a step back, nature of Mathematics research any easier. Knowing things helps solve problems, but really only knowing the right things. So I will start doing a bit more, and reading somewhat less. Those PDFs which I have in my "to read" folder, and yet haven't been read in two years. I may as well accept that I will never read them (or maybe one day I will have a real reason to read them, in which case, I can read them then)...