Things Lost and Won During the Plague
In early March of this year, I was attending a conference in Austria, giving a minicourse about my work on the g-theorem. The virus had made its way from its origin in China to Italy, and a few of the Italian participants were worried about their families
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1 Blissfully Unaware in the Mountains In early March of this year, I was attending a conference in Austria, giving a minicourse about my work on the g-theorem. The virus had made its way from its origin in China to Italy, and a few of the Italian participants were worried about their families. We heard that countries were closing their borders and, as people tend to do when they are getting nervous, many were making jokes, while others were getting scared about getting back to their country (indeed, Trump announced that the US would be closing its borders that week). Nevertheless, I was hardly concerned. It was a very nice week, and I spent it hiking and thinking about mathematics. I had recently discovered a relation between l2-cohomology of certain contractible manifolds (which is a useful way to think about the geometry of unbounded spaces, measuring how much like a valley a space might look) and some things I had been working on, and was pretty absentmindedly stepping through the melting snow as I was trying to get my mind around the way that symmetry might enter into a calculation I had in mind, trying different things. I tend to match my walking to my thoughts, so before I knew it, my feet were wet and I was in the middle of the mountains. At other times, I was explaining some details of my talk to students, but I slowly noticed that people were vanishing because their home countries were stopping flights. My wife contacted me when I would get home, starting to get worried about Denmark (where we live) closing its borders, and I myself was getting kind of nervous. But to be honest, I was still getting sidetracked in my thoughts, often K. Adiprasito (*) Department of Mathematics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © 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_1
K. Adiprasito
returning to mathematics instead of focusing on getting home. In the mountains, I tend to forget all emails and worries, so I kept stepping into the snow, thinking about this and that. In this situation, I hardly registered that I also got an email, from Volker Mehrmann, president of the EMS, when I was about to leave for a workshop in Sweden before returning home. I was so deep in thoughts, I do not remember getting that email in that week, and was only able to reconstruct it from the dates on the email. I must have been entirely unaware it said something about a prize at this point.
2 The Trip to Stockholm To be honest, I should have cancelled that trip. But there was a close friend, Igor Pak, in Stockholm that told me he was bored, lonely at Institut Mittag Leffler and wanted to talk mathematics, and with him, that was always terribly fun. Any discussion with him is marvellous, devolving into a mix of anecdotes, jokes and scientific discourse. These are often fruitful (w
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