Last fall, Matilde Marcolli gave a course at CalTech entitled Oral Presentation: The (Martial) Art of Giving Talks. The purpose of this course was to teach students “how to effectively communicate their work in seminars and conferences and how to defend it from criticism from the audience”.

The lecture notes contain basic information on the different types of talks and how to prepare them. But they really shine when it comes to spotting the badasses in the public and how to respond to their interference. She identifies 5 badsass-types : the empreror and the hierophant (see below), the chariot (the one with a literal mind, asking continuously for details), the fool (the one who happens to sit in the talk but doesn’t belong there) and the magician (the quick smartass).

I’ll just quote here the description of, and most effective strategy against, the first two badass-types. Please have a look at the whole paper, it is a good read!

“The Emperor is the typical figure of power and authority in a given field. It refers to those people who have a tendency to think that the whole field is their own private property, and in particular that only what they do in the field is important, that the work of all others is derivative and that in any case they are not being quoted enough. These are typically pathological narcissists, so one needs to take this into account in interacting with them.
The trouble of having The Emperor in your audience is that he (it is rarely she) can very easily disrupt your presentation completely, by continuous interruptions, by running his own commentary while you are trying to stay focused on delivering your talk and by distracting the rest of the audience.
The Emperor is by far one of the most dangerous encounters you can make in the wilderness of the conference rooms.”

Counter-measure : “Keep in mind that the Emperor is a pathological narcissist: part of the reason why he keeps interrupting your talk is because he cannot stand the fact that, during those fifty minutes, the attention of the audience is focused on you and not on him. His continuous interruptions and complaints are a way to try to divert the attention of the audience back to him and away from you. That your talk gets disrupted in the process, he could not care the less.
A good way to try to avoid the worst case scenario is to make sure (if you know in advance you may be having the Emperor in the audience) that you arrange in your talk to make frequent references to him and his work. In this way, he will hopefully feel that his need to be at the center of attention is sufficiently satisfied that he can let you continue with your talk. Effectiveness: high.”

“The Hierophant represents a priestly figure. What this refers to here is the type of character who feels entitled to represent (and defend) a certain “orthodoxy”, a certain school of thought, or a certain group of people within the field.
Typically the hierophants are the minions and lackeys of the Emperor, his entourage and fan club, those who think that the Emperor represents the only and true orthodoxy in the field and that anything that is done in a different way should be opposed and suppressed.
These characters are generally less disruptive than the Emperor himself, as they are really only fighting you on someone else’s behalf. Nonetheless, they can sometime manage to seriously disrupt your presentation.”

Counter-measure : “This is essentially the same advise as in the case of the Emperor. To an objection that substantially is of the form: “This is not the right way to do things because this is not what what we do (= what the Emperor does)”, which is what you expect to hear from the Hierophant, you can reply along lines such as: “There is also another approach to this problem, developed by the Emperor and his school, which is a very interesting approach that gave nice and important results. However, this is not what I am talking about today: I am talking here about a different approach, and I will be focusing only on the specific features of this other approach…”
Something along these lines would recognize “their” work without having to make any concession on their approach being the only game in town.
Effectiveness: high (unless the Emperor is also present and is delegating to his hierophants the task of attacking you: in that case they won’t give up so easily and the effectiveness of this line of defense becomes medium/low).”

I’ve never apologized for prolonged periods of blogsilence and have no intention to start now.

But, sometimes you need to expose the things holding you back before you can turn the page and (hopefully) start afresh.

Long time readers of this blog know I’ve often warned against group-think, personality cults and the making of exaggerate claims as possible threats to the survival of noncommutative geometry (for example in the group think post).

However, I was totally unprepared for this comment left on the noncommutative geometry blog, begin October:

Noncommutative Geometry is a field whose history is unpredictable.
When should I expect the pickaxe? Yours, Leon Trotsky

After sharing this on Google+ someone emailed suggesting I’d better have a look at some ‘semi-secret’ blogs. I did spend the better part of that friday going through more than 3 years worth of blogposts and cried my eyes out.

It is sad to read a message in a bottle and notice that after more than two years the matter is still far from resolved.

I wish you all a healing and liberating 2012!

A few years ago a student entered my office asking suggestions for his master thesis.

“I’m open to any topic as long as it has nothing to do with those silly quivers!”

At that time not the best of opening-lines to address me and, inevitably, the most disastrous teacher-student-conversation-ever followed (also on my part, i’m sorry to say).

This week, Markus Reineke had a similar, though less confrontational, experience. Markus gave a mini-course on ‘moduli spaces of representations’ in our advanced master class. Students loved the way he introduced representation varieties and constructed the space of irreducible representations as a GIT-quotient. In fact, his course was probably the first in that program having an increasing (rather than decreasing) number of students attending throughout the week…

In his third lecture he wanted to illustrate these general constructions and what better concrete example to take than representations of quivers? Result : students’ eyes staring blankly at infinity…

What is it that quivers do to have this effect on students?

Perhaps quiver-representations cause them an information-overload.

Perhaps we should take plenty of time to explain that in going from the quiver (the directed graph) to the path algebra, vertices become idempotents and arrows the remaining generators. These idempotents split a representation space into smaller vertex-spaces, the dimensions of which we collect in a dimension-vector, the big basechange group splits therefore into a product of small vertex-basechanges and the action of this product on an matrix corresponding to an arrow is merely usual conjugation by the big basechange-group, etc. etc. Blatant trivialities to someone breathing quivers, but probably we too had to take plenty of time once to disentangle this information-package…

But then, perhaps they consider quivers and their representations as too-concrete-old-math-stuff, when there’s so much high-profile-fancy-math still left to taste.

When given the option, students prefer you to tell them monstrous-moonshine stories even though they can barely prove simplicity of $A_5$, they want you to give them a short-cut to the Langlands programme but have never had the patience nor the interest to investigate the splitting of primes in quadratic number fields, they want to be taught schemes and their structure sheaves when they still struggle with the notion of a dominant map between varieties…

In short, students often like to run before they can crawl.

Working through the classification of some simple quiver-settings would force their agile feet firmly on the ground. They probably experience this as a waste of time.

Perhaps, it is time to promote slow math…