Dodging a Bullet
This article is an expanded version of a letter to the Editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). In it, I give an inside look at a cancelled meeting of the AMS. Someday, when one looks back at mathematics in this unusual period in
- PDF / 55,419 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 73 Downloads / 161 Views
This article is an expanded version of a letter to the Editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). In it, I give an inside look at a cancelled meeting of the AMS. Someday, when one looks back at mathematics in this unusual period in history, it may be useful to have a few contemporaneous first-hand accounts. I was the local organizer of the Sectional Meeting of the AMS at Tufts University scheduled for March 21–22, 2020. The impetus for this meeting, at least for my department, was to showcase the university and the Department of Mathematics, for although we have made great strides in the last thirty years, Tufts is still not widely known. Even with the help of my colleagues and the competent staff at Tufts Conference and Event Services, I must have put in at least one hundred hours over the past two years into organizing this meeting, from personally inspecting every room and its audiovisual equipment to raising funds, to lining up presenters for invited addresses and moderators for contributed paper sessions, to finding alumni speakers for a non-academic career panel, to inviting the provost to give welcoming remarks, to arranging for food and coffee, and to planning a reception for 250, as well as acting as the liaison to the AMS, and a host of other responsibilities. Meanwhile, in early 2020, the coronavirus was raging in China and Italy, but there were only a few cases in the United States, mostly concentrated in Washington and California. In late February and early March, the federal authorities were assuring the country that the situation was under control. No one was wearing masks. In fact, it was recommended that other than medical personnel, people should not wear masks because they would not offer protection if improperly worn.
The author gratefully acknowledges the suggestions of Jeffrey D. Carlson, Elizabeth Loew, Stephen Schnably, Linda Tu, and various anonymous reviewers that helped to improve this article. L. W. Tu (*) Department of Mathematics, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; URL: https://ltu.pages.tufts.edu © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Wonders (ed.) Math in the Time of Corona, Mathematics Online First Collections, https://doi.org/10.1007/16618_2020_15
L. W. Tu
On March 2, there were only two confirmed cases in Massachusetts, both infected from traveling abroad, and no deaths. Later it emerged that a number of people who had attended a Biogen leadership conference in Boston on February 27 had tested positive, but the extent of the infection was still not known. Back then, officials and scientists in Massachusetts were also minimizing the danger, reiterating for several days that the risk posed by the virus was low and claiming that there was no evidence of community spread in the state. All indications were that the AMS meeting would go on as scheduled. A total of 415 participants had preregistered. Counting those who would register on site, we expected five hundred participants. It would be t
Data Loading...
