When Hollywood casts its lens on academia, it tends to portray us mathematicians as rather extreme caricatures: loners covered in chalk dust, stuck in a frantic race between the search for a long-awaited proof and the inevitable descent into insanity. While this overly dramatic depiction may make for compelling cinema, it overlooks the crucial fact that mathematics is an inherently social pursuit. Indeed, although we generally do not require flashy and expensive equipment to conduct our research, we still find ourselves applying for grants to fund our work, with that money going towards hiring research assistants and travelling to attend conferences and undertake research visits, all so that we may work with our fellow colleagues.
Thus, when the COVID pandemic triggered global lockdowns in 2020, even the world of pure mathematics felt its impact. That March, I, a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, had joined my research group in attending a workshop at the Tel Aviv University. The very week we were there is when Israel closed its borders, leaving us wondering whether we would be able to make our way home. Fortunately, we were still in time to catch our flights, but after returning to Berlin we found that the combination of border closures and new university policies meant we could no longer travel abroad.
Cut off from our international collaborators and, thanks to social distancing requirements and office closures, even from our local colleagues, research progress slowed. Although we had more time on our hands to edit manuscripts and wrap up existing projects, without the ability to discuss problems together and bounce ideas off one another, new proofs were hard to come by. Just as it seemed that mathematics might come to a standstill, though, technology came to the rescue.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and thankfully, our computer science brethren were up to the task. Video conferencing capabilities were scaled up in record time, and before long, ‘Zooming’ had entered our daily vocabulary. Meanwhile, Overleaf’s online LaTeX editing platform was widely adopted, allowing collaborators to prepare papers together, regardless of how many miles lay between them. Suddenly, the research visits, conferences, and seminars that were getting cancelled were now taking place online instead, allowing mathematics to flourish through this new medium. In the immortal words of Jurassic Park’s Dr. Ian Malcolm, “life, uh, finds a way.”
From a personal perspective, I have greatly benefited from this shift to online platforms. During the pandemic, I moved to Taiwan, joining the faculty here at the National Taiwan University. My specialty, extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, is not (yet) that widely represented in Taiwan, but via Zoom, I have been able to continue working with my collaborators from abroad.
Recently, for example, I have enjoyed working on problems in odd-Ramsey numbers (where one, motivated by an application from coding theory, seeks to colour the edges of a graph with as few colours as possible while maintaining certain parity constraints on subgraphs) with my friends and fellow researchers, Simona Boyadzhiyska, Thomas Lesgourgues, and Kalina Petrova. Our collaboration originally began years ago when we met in-person at a conference, but since then we have all moved to different countries. In pre-COVID times, that would have posed great difficulties for our joint work, as it is slow going to work asynchronously and then keep track of updated .tex files via e-mail. Instead, for our latest project, conducted entirely online, we scheduled frequent Zoom calls (somehow finding suitable windows between morning coffees in Canada and bedtimes here in Taiwan) where we’d discuss our ideas together, keeping a record of everything in our shared Overleaf project. This made it easy for us to combine our ideas to eventually solve the problem at hand, and looking back, not only is the resulting paper one I am very proud of, but the project itself was one of the most fun I’ve had.
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