|
|
| Настроение: |  sleepy |
Mathematics as a Team Sport
Intentional serendipity is a motif at Oberwolfach. The institute works to minimize distractions from math and to remove any barriers to collaboration. No locks, restricted Wi-Fi, and meals served family style with seats assigned at random before lunch and dinner.
“They don’t want the same three friends to always talk to one another,” Stefan Friedl, a professor at the University of Regensburg and one of the organizers of that week’s event, had told me two weeks earlier. “They want to force people to talk to people they might not know yet.”
The institute also serves cake every afternoon except on Wednesday, when the group takes a hike over dirt roads into the village of Oberwolfach Kirche for Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest cake), a chocolate specialty of the region. And, of course, there’s booze. The dining hall features a refrigerator full of tall bottles of German beer, a barrel of red wine on tap, and schnapps for 1 euro a pour, all self-serve and on the honor system. Place your coin in the box.
...
“If you look at the average math paper in 1920 compared to the average math paper published in 2020, the average number of authors has grown dramatically,” David Futer of Temple University, one of the workshop participants, told me.
There are lots of reasons for the shift. Technology makes collaboration easier than ever, of course. There’s also just much more mathematics to know than there used to be. It’s a good idea to have many minds gathered around the table, all of whom have a slightly (or sometimes vastly) different library of knowledge to draw on. That is the premise of spending a week at Oberwolfach — and at a handful of other institutes around the world that are modeled on it, including the Banff International Research Station in Canada and Casa Matemática Oaxaca in Mexico.
Бедные аутисты, попадающие в Обервольфах.
(Читать комментарии) Добавить комментарий:
|
|
![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
k_d_s)
