How have lack of travel and increased social isolation affected mathematics?

On February 22 — a lifetime ago now — the mathematician Priyam Patel was at Charles de Gaulle airport, waiting to catch a connecting flight home to Salt Lake City. She noticed a sign urging travelers to wash their hands to protect against COVID-19 transmission.

“I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if that’s going to be a big deal?’” she said.

Patel, a professor at the University of Utah, was returning from a retreat at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in the Black Forest of southern Germany. For the previous week, she’d lived in close quarters and shared family-style meals with 50 other mathematicians. I was there too, and wrote about it in a recent Quanta story titled “Mathematics as a Team Sport.” I saw how gathering in one place for a sustained period of time is an essential part of modern mathematics research. Such experiences provide mathematicians with a chance to bounce ideas off each other and start new collaborations. They essentially prime the research pump.

Now, in the age of COVID-19, they’re not happening anymore.

The disease was a frequent topic of discussion that week at Oberwolfach, which focused on low-dimensional topology, the study of three- and four-dimensional shapes. The virus had not yet upended life in most parts of the world. In retrospect, our time in the German forest now feels like the calm before the storm. Soon after Patel and her colleagues returned to their homes, COVID-19 transformed into a global preoccupation. And as it spread, upcoming math conferences started being cancelled — first one, then another, then all of them for the foreseeable future.

“It’s pretty clear that such conferences will not run for 12 months,” said Stefan Friedl, a professor at the University of Regensburg and one of the organizers of that week at Oberwolfach. The established pattern of mathematical collaboration was broken.

I decided to call up several of the mathematicians I’d met in Germany to find out how they thought the lack of travel and increased social isolation would affect mathematics. I also just wanted to see how they were doing (though luckily, no one knew of any positive cases among the attendees). In many ways I found them like everyone else, just trying to get by in a radically altered world.

“I’m trying to start each day saying what absolutely has to get done workwise, because not much more than that is going to get done,” said David Futer, a mathematician at Temple University who attended the workshop.

No one I talked to had gotten much new math done. They were preoccupied with the news, distracted by kids at home, and pulled between online Zoom meetings.

“I feel like my time now is broken into little Zoom chunks,” said Yair Minsky, chair of the math department at Yale University and one of the mathematicians I met in Germany.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3aRn64x