My Thanks to MGO!

Here's an account of what happened last weekend. The short version is that we were here. A longer version follows.






















Here you can see the Michigan delegation – excluding me, but stricktly speaking I might in fact belong to the Finnish delegation – walking towards the campus. That is not the math building, though. It is the art building. But the campus was really beautiful, at least what we saw of it. And here I am gracefully forgetting the chemistry and engineering buildings of course.

The fact that the campus was located on a small hill somehow made all the difference, it gave a feeling of exitement, air and great views. Or maybe I'm just sick of the omnipresent flatness here in Michigan.

The math building had the warm warn atmosphere of an old library building – which it really was – with the pompous cold stones and cosy warm woods.




I think that a yearly math grad conference is an amazingly great idea. I had problems understanding why everybody wasn't there. Imagine: All the fun of a conference and the possibility of actually understanding some of the talks. Also if you really want to be a mathematician, these are the people you'll want to be working with in the future. The current big guys will actually be dead when we are older.

We should definitely have a math grad conference in Finland! Do you suppose one could apply some eu-money for it? Also a math grad student organization is a great idea, but we already do have one of those in Helsinki. Their organization sounds a bit more lively than ours does yet, though... How is our organization holding up, buy the way?

The only fault with the conference was that it was really short. Such a shy finn as me won't have enough time to meet new people in just two days. Also we were really tired during the reception on Friday. Maybe if we had stayed longer and had more wine also meeting new people might have been easier. That just proves my principle of always to arrive in the conference place the day before the conference starts.



I gave a talk on doubling measures. The proof can be seen in the picture here. Do you like my title slide? The talk went well and Tomasz praised my slides so I'm very proud.




I also listened to Kevin's, Marie's, Tomasz' and Derek's talks. That ment that I was able to hear only one talk by a grad student I didn't already know before.

But we did meet some new friends including Saara from Rice and Marie from Michigan. The proof of their existence can be seen in this picture.

















We also got acquainted with the us airline practices, learned something about prime numbers (at least I did), discussed taking pictures of buildings, drank lots of vodka, learned about the Finnish mafia in the Syracuse math departement and of course – met uncle Tadeusz, as he is warmly called amongst the Helsinki analysis grad students.

To conclude I have to say I'd go to any conference Tomasz is organizing, he took such a good care of us.

Also huge thanks to all of the people at MGO: the conference was simply great!






















Here is Tomasz. Some other friends can be seen through the mirror in the background. Also go and check out a bunch of other pics from the trip on my Flickr page including “Too Much Math Makes You Yellow?” and “Live long and prosper”.