Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

There are very few lives and even fewer that are satisfying that don't place a person in the context of a group, whether it be work, family, friends, etc.  My childhood had a great deal of stability and so the first group I was conscious of was my birth family. Later friends in the neighborhood and school classes extended that. Many of us assimilate what it means to be a part of a group at an early age, with adjustments as our social networks evolve in the teen years and then the workforce, etc.  I played in a school soccer team for two years but I never really considered that to be formative; I wasn't very good at it and so I avoided a lot of relationships on the team out of shame at my lack of coordination. On the other hand, 56 years ago, I started performing in music ensembles. While many males (the expectations are different for the genders despite the prevalence of excellent female athletes) do and are expected to learn group dynamics in athletic contexts, it was musical...

Yesterday was the first day of classes for the Fall Term at my university. I've been doing this for a long time but I am always surprised by the rush of adrenaline that comes with the start of classes. I enjoy teaching and the sight of students in the classroom directly triggers the accumulated feelings I've amassed.

Long before I arrived at my university in 1988, the week before classes was set aside as Planning Week for returning faculty. (Staff planned all summer long.) I've had various leadership roles over the decades and more often than not I was responsible for leading one or more meetings during this week.  My routine for leading a meeting was to remind people of the date with some lead time and ask for suggestions for the agenda with a firm deadline, write the agenda and distribute it, and annotate the agenda with specific goals that I did not so much hide as leave out to keep the agenda from being too verbose. At the meeting I would take notes of the discussion on my copy of the agenda for follow-up details, try to make sure that everyone was participating, nip in the bud separate conversations among subsets of the group that excluded others, point out when the group was repeating itself, and articulate draft consensuses (consensi?) for the group to revise or object to. While it was i...

The procedure went well as far as I can tell. My knee was and is a bit tender; icing helped but I did intensive PT this morning (part evaluation) and I'm feeling it now that I'm in my office. My physical therapist suggest six more weeks of PT once a week, and that makes sense; I could bend more this morning for having had the procedure but there's still room for improvement. I struggle, again, with the process of general anesthesia. For all my failings I have been able to rely on being observant and having a good memory for what I bear witness to. General anesthesia goes directly against that: I have experiences and at least in the beginning I converse with people with no memory afterward. There was a period of time when I co-chaired a university task force on alcohol use, misuse, abuse. That's a story for another post. But there was significant overlap between our work with alcohol and the incidence of regretted sexual experiences, a phrase which I've learned cover...

My right knee was replaced on May 22. I have had physical therapy regularly in the intervening (nearly) twelve weeks. I have recovered most of my flexibility but not as much as I and my health care team want. The most visible symptom is that when I walk down stairs my right foot catches regularly on the step, my knee not bending enough to avoid it. Less visibly I am aware of the small (five or ten degrees) deficit in flexibility whenever I walk. When my left knee was replaced in 2021 and I was at a similar stage I had a procedure known as Manipulation Under Anesthesia performed as an outpatient procedure. I was given a general anesthetic and the surgeon bent my knee enough to rip the scar tissue. I am scheduled to have the same procedure first thing tomorrow morning. While there are no guarantees about tomorrow, four years ago the MUA worked perfectly. I had no pain after the procedure (the scar tissue not having a lot of nerve tissue) and my knee acquired the necessary flexibility. It...

I've spent a half week in Sacramento attending MathFest, an annual meeting of the Mathematical Association of America. I joined the MAA in 1978; I was a high school student taking upper level math courses at nearby Ursinus College, and one of the department members, John Shuck, taught most of my classes. I still consider him to be one of my best math instructors, finding ways to explain and motivate difficult mathematics concepts. He was an MAA member and invited me to use one of Ursinus's student memberships. I continued when I went on to university myself and now have been a member for 47 years. Hard to believe. Side note: I ran into Shuck at a math conference years later and had the opportunity to thank him for the help he gave me at the start of my career. He remembered me. Sometimes life's like that. The MAA focuses on faculty and students, primarily at the undergraduate level but also at the graduate level. I have found regional and national service in the MAA to be i...

I arrived in Sacramento today for MathFest.  The name MathFest always feels a bit inward-facing to me---only my tribe seems to find math festive. The conference hasn't started yet; traveling three time zones I wanted to arrive before things started to allow for travel mishaps; sure enough my first of two flights today was delayed enough to make connecting to the second flight impossible. Big up's to the Delta phone app; it offered me alternatives and I found one with a different connecting city that had more of a layover (I had been nervous for the original layover being too short, which it turned out to be). I did arrive quite early though. Second, big up's to Hyatt for letting me have a room at noon when check-in time is 4 PM. In times past when this has occurred I have checked luggage and wandered a bit until my room was ready but this is much nicer. I am a bit wearied, having started my day at 3:00 AM EDT (early and paranoid about there being flight problems, said paran...