Thanksgiving

Nothing beats a Thanksgiving with friends!  

This Thanksgiving, Asuman, a professor in my department had myself and two other families over to her house for a great turkey dinner.  With eleven people involved, this is more like a day long party than anything else.  After polishing off a variety of tasty dishes and desserts, we went up to Mt. Baldy for a hike afterwards.  Then those with the skills hit the Backgammon boards, while the more stuffed people like myself just chatted away the afternoon and evening.  I know what I'm thankful for:  wonderful friends that make life that much sweeter.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This was a year of tremendous change for me. At the beginning of the year, I had no clue where I would be living or whether I could find a place that matched my outlook and particular talents.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful that life turned out great! I'm now most of the way through my first semester at Claremont McKenna College, and life is good. The class sizes are small, the students are bright and enthusiastic, and the teaching load is light enough that I still have plenty of time to pursue research.

CMC is part of the Claremont University Consortium, a collection of five undergraduate and two graduate institutions that yield a unique environment. Across the colleges there are about 50 mathematicians, which makes it large enough to support several colloquium series that I attend regularly. However, my own department at CMC has only ten tenure track faculty, which makes for a nice department able to move quickly when it needs to. Thanks partially to the free lunch that CMC faculty get once a week, I have had the chance to have lunch with almost everyone, and get to know people through the time honored way of lunch time chats.

Finally, I'm thankful for the invitation from Asuman Aksoy to join her family's Thanksgiving celebration today. Happy turkey day, everyone!

Thanksgiving

Top ten things I am thankful for:

1) Family and friends.
2) The food whose smells are wafting towards me even as I speak.

Now with the mandatory thanks out of the way...
3) Being born in a time and place where they actually pay people to do mathematics!
4) Along those same lines: The Enlightenment.
5) Literacy. Not only do I personally love to read, it has my vote for the most important aspect of civilization, the ability to reach across time and space to communicate.
6) Peace. The U.S. and others are at war, but compared to the last century, this is still a remarkably peaceful time. Only time will tell if it stays so.
7) The Sixth Amendment o the U.S. Constitution. The right to face ones accuser and know the evidence presented against them at trial represents a shift away from barbarism and fear. I only wish it were universally applied.
8) The Internet. I studied the building of the railroads in history class, but here was a brand new network growing and evolving before my eyes. The technology, the bubble, all of it was and is wonderfully exciting.
9) Science fiction. A library full of people who believed that new discoveries where always around the corner.
10) And right now, the sunny day that is giving me a beautiful view of the water. Sometimes the simplest things are the best.

Happy Thanksgiving!