Some excuses for mathematics

I arrived in Europe intact, and have spent the last couple of days in Plzen, in the Czech Republic, being wined and dined at others' expense for a workshop on graph theory, and wiggling my way over a Czech keyboard to profit from the free conference internet. My invitation to the workshop came thanks to Jozef, the Auckland mathematician for whom I did some research last summer on the topic. The other people here are largely Czechs and Slovaks, plus some Western Europeans and Aussies and Kiwis who are past or present students of Jozef or Mirka (conference matriarch, now Australian-based) or other Czechoslovakian expats.

I gave my talk yesterday. I was rather disappointed with it; I've done better lectures to olympiad kids with five minutes' prep. Despite a beautiful set of slides written during a 16-hour Hong Kong stopover, it didn't go nearly as well as I'd hoped -- probably due partly to nerves and partly to being almost entirely impromptu. I spent an unforgivable (to a mathematician) amount of time trying to justify my interest in the area. I also had the bad luck to get confused when trying to explain the history of work on the topic -- this when the majority of the mathematicians whom I was citing were actually in the room watching! -- and didn't really present the most interesting idea of the work I'd done well enough to make it look particularly impressive.

Sample reactions --
Eyal, fellow Aucklander, a Ph.D. student of Jozef's and now studying in Bratislava for eight months: "Nice talk!"
Tomas, my Slovakian co-author- (on a different piece of work) to-be, Bratislava Ph.D. student of Jozef's: "Nice talk -- though we Slovakians couldn't really understand your accent."
Mirka: "Nice talk, but why didn't you consider the diameter-3 case?"
random French guy: "Nice talk -- I look forward to hearing your main results."
Feeling kind of outclassed now.

If I stop thinking of maths and start thinking of it as a kind of glorified summer camp, the workshop begins to seem much more fun. Gorgeous faux-farmhouse accommodation, a room to myself, lovely Czech meals with breads and meats and fruit and ridiculously strong-flavoured radishes and mustards and pickled onions, and all the beer etc. we can drink. The afternoons are free for sightseeing and the other mathematicians are lovely.

On Wednesday we climbed up to see a local fortress overlooking the area, with a mysterious stone-walled pit in front of it, right down to water level, whose purpose I could only guess at. Yesterday we took the trolley-bus into town to visit the Pilsener brewery (with "informative historical videos" which in New Zealand would be considered advertising misleading enough to be banned from TV), the local cathedral (huge and stone, with little tiny lamps hanging from the ceiling in a seemingly impossible attempt to light the place) and a local cake shop (with cakes from a special brittle Czechoslovakian biscuit I'm told you cook by pressing batter between two hot pans). I'm getting used to the way Czech words look and to how to pronounce the various accents. I saw an electronics shop in town yesterday advertising "notebooky", which made my day.

To Prague this afternoon after the end of the conference, with Eyal and his girlfriend Lauren, and to Bratislava to visit Jozef on Monday.