I'm Alive!

It has been over a month now since my last post and I view it as a necessary declaration to the world that I am alive! Yes I have successfully survived. Survived what you may ask? Survived life! Yes, as the denizens of Senior Haus like to put it: "Sport Death -- Only Life Can Kill you!"

So what is this relapse, this break in the regularity of not posting? It is a brief repose I am granting myself for finishing all of my applications to graduate school! For those of you who are curious, I've applied for PhD programs in mathematics at the following fine institutes:

1. Stanford
2. Berkeley
3. University of Chicago
4. Brown
5. Columbia
6. Caltech
7. Cornell
8. UPenn
9. UCSD
10. UCSC
11. UMD

The ordering roughly indicates the perceived "quality" of the PhD programs by faculty both at MIT and just mathematicians more broadly. There are some debatable points, and I have slightly superimposed my preference of where I'd like to go, but this is a partial ordering on the institutes I'd like to attend. Of course the naturally gaping hole in this list is the absence of MIT, Princeton, and Harvard. Well, I decided to save my money, because the odds of me getting into any of the top three are slim to none. MIT doesn't want to hold onto their own undergraduates (unless you happen to walk on water) and there tends to be this prevailing attitude that if you spend your undergraduate career at MIT, you need to clear room and "give someone else a chance." I agree with this philosophy largely, but the prevalence of people from smaller, lesser known colleges and universities at MIT for grad school is testament to the fact that sometimes its better to be the largest fish in a small pond than a marlin in the ocean.

So Kudos! to those of you who busted butt at state school while the rest of your friends were doing case races. I just hope that my hundreds of dollars on application fees and four years of struggling will pay off likewise.

The dream plan is that both my girlfriend and I get accepted to either Stanford or Berkeley AND we both win either a Gates or Churchill to fund a year on the other side of the pond to do Part III. I've had it put to me "What would you do if Cambridge offered you a PhD position?" Well that is a tough one, but if I wasn't accepted to anywhere comparable in the States, I'd be seriously tempted by the 3 year PhD at one of the world's best institutes. Of course another large factor would be where my partner is going... the two-body problem is difficult, but solvable.

Of course there is also something to be said about the broad, foundational coursework required by nearly all American PhDs. To be able to speak intelligibly about most fundamental areas of mathematics and pass quals is an achievement in of itself. Granted, after spending some time at Cambridge, I get the sense that you really do get to know a lot more mathematics as an undergraduate, so perhaps the quals system is not necessary for a British PhD. Some people criticize Cambridge students of becoming too specialized, but honestly I've seen specialization in even more drastic forms at MIT. A good number of the very best math students at MIT, forego doing their GIRs until later in their undergraduate career and instead pursue pure mathematics as instensely as one could imagine. I have met people who have only taken one undergraduate math course, with the rest being of graduate level, and granted I stand in awe of their achievements, I can't help but feel like they are pushing too high too fast by not exploring other ideas in other courses. Yet, these people are becoming more and more "the expected" if you are really intent on becoming a pure mathematician. Publishing, being a Putnam fellow, conducting serious pure mathematical research as an undergraduate, doing your graduate-level coursework as an undergrad... are all becoming the golden stamp of acceptance into the very best graduate math PhD programs in the states. It almost makes one wonder what the purpose of graduate school really is. There isn't really any "schooling" rather it is just 5 years of teaching yourself mathematics and working on a research problem. As idyllic as this sounds, I still want some schooling and although I think I'm building myself up to pursue symplectic geometry as a field of research, I feel like I'm blossoming too late and compared to the sophomore taking algebraic topology, there is little hope in actually contributing to mathematics.

This leads me into my new favorite story of inspiration -- Ed Witten. For those of you who don't know him immediately and faint at the surge of intelligence generated in the Akashic field simply by mentioning his name, Ed Witten is many ways the father and shepard of string theory -- the still reigning contender for potentially unifying theory of everything. Ed Witten is not only the physicist with the highest h-number -- has h publications, each cited h number of times, a supposed quantifier of both productivity and profundity -- of any living physicist (h_Ed=117), but he is also the first physicist to ever win the mathematician's even more prestigious version of the Nobel -- the Fields Medal. Well here is a shocker for you:

Ed Witten was a history major.

That's right, a history major from Brandeis, who wanted to be a political journalist coming out of undergrad, who entered a PhD program in economics at U Wisconsion at Madison and dropped out, is now today's greatest string theorist. He was not some hot-housed mathematical prodigy who spent his every waking moment being fed mathematics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner -- he was a history major. Although Ed Witten's father was a physicist, and probably wasn't totally ignorant of his mathematical abilities, he did do what we all hope to experience -- he soul-searched, he wandered, he let his mental legs cover this wide intellectual world, and felt the same sense of indecision, disorientation and failure that most mortals do and then he found what he was destined to do, siezed it by the very scruff on the back of its neck and did something great, transcended mortality and entered the realm of the Gods -- may we all be so lucky.

The peculiar bit to Ed Witten's story is how a history major, economics-PhD-dropout, got accepted to Princeton's Applied Math program. The sobering note of this story is that replicating Ed Witten's steps nowadays is probably impossible.

I can only hope that my years of soul-searching and experimentation in other departments and realms of learning, and late discovery of the beauty of mathematics will not be punished by the grad admissions committees. Whenever I express my pessimism to friends they ask, "Oh, are your grades not that good?" No, I actually have a perfect GPA in math. "Then what's the problem?" The problem, compadre, is that I did wander and although I have all the necessary ingredients for graduate studies in mathematics, I didn't do loads of graduate level courses as an undergraduate. The attitude among most MIT students is that you do theoretical math because it is hard... not because it is beautiful, but because you want to show off your intellectual machismo and then go off and work in finance or do graduate studies in some other field. There is no point to your studies -- you do it because it is difficult and nothing more. My problem is that I never subscribed to this philosophy. I always did things because I was interested, because I saw purpose, I saw meaning, I saw beauty, that is the only reason I did or will do anything -- beauty.

So I will try to keep everyone up to date on my pursuit of beauty.

Thanks for tuning in.