Just out of curiosity

Maths are rigorous, complete, and "correct". By "correct" I mean that we can prove that our statements are true. But when we apply maths to investigate biological systems, we cannot prove anything about these systems - actually, we cannot prove anything in applied science - we can just provide theories and evidence in support of those theories. Science is revisionistic and there is no amount of mathematics that will ever change that.  So when we apply mathematics to study biological systems, the goal is never to prove that a theory is true.  I see my research in collaboration with biologists as providing 'food for thought', for example: 1. When we collaborate, our discussions offer different points of view and ways of structuring thought and the research project. 2. While we cannot provide 'proof', modeling can offer a new interpretation of biological events. 3. The model can point to new directions to explore or spark new questions. This happens esp...

I do not know what happened today, the day just went past me and I did not realize it. It felt as if the day was way shorter than usual. I have worked all day and my pile of work has increased rather than diminished. What has happened? How did the hours slip by so quickly? Probably it was because of the decision-making. Today I had quite a few decisions to make and difficult emails to write and those take a lot of time, but they do not make me feel productive. Tomorrow I am taking back "control" of time again. This is just a psychological trick that consists of "ticking boxes" like emptying the inbox or fulfilling a given task to the end (e.g., sending a referee report). This gives me a sense of accomplishment and I need these little things from time to time in this sea of long projects that I am navigating.

On the surface it may seem that we are giving equal opportunities to everyone to study mathematics at university. Of course, we know that it is not completely true because many factors play an important role, like differences in economic and social background - being well off and having people supporting you makes opportunities seem more real. Still, the fact is that, where I am, everyone has the right to go to university and, therefore, everyone has the right to study mathematics. But even before going to university, children and youngsters may already have been robbed of the opportunity, not because of lack of financial or external support, but by lack of internal support. Robbing opportunities this way works very simply: convince children that they are inferior to others (because, e.g., they belong to a given group), convince them that they cannot do it, convince them that they do not belong somewhere. This process will create an inner voice in the child that will whisper relentless...

This quote in Someday is today  by Matthew Dicks resonates so much with me: "One of the primary stumbling blocks for most of the creative and entrepreneurial people I meet is the inability to actually launch their endeavor. Rather than saying yes and leaping into the abyss, people wait, calculate, ponder, and prepare. There is always a better time. The right time. Conditions that must be met in order to achieve the perfect time. They also tend to cling to their original vision, unable to see divergent paths and new opportunities. They have dreamed of a single thing for a long time, and as a result, they cannot reconfigure, reimagine, or pivot to something new. They can’t say yes to a new possibility because they remain locked on their original dream. But instead of waiting, you must say yes. You must launch, regardless of your state of preparation or accumulation of resources. Perfection is insidious. The desire for perfection is nothing more than fear masquerading as something el...

Today Steffen Plunder defended his thesis. He is the first PhD student to graduate that I have supervised on my own. We did it! A PhD is a long project that requires a high level of motivation and self-management. It is time to look back at the path walked and all the challenges that were faced. Steffen did great and will start soon to work as a post-doc at the University of Kyoto.  It is hard to write right now. The defense finished like an hour ago and everything feels still a bit unreal. Words are not coming to me. 

A tip from editor Harry Dewulf on how to edit novels: understand the objective of every chapter, every scene, and every paragraph (even every sentence and word), and ask yourself if they are fulfilling their purpose. This is so different from life: in life things happen that do not seem to serve any purpose (maybe we make up a purpose a posteriori), but in storytelling, every element should serve the story in some way; it is not about filling pages. I find that this is even truer in academic texts: every word should count and serve the purpose of conveying your message, because that is the fundamental goal of any text. In a novel, the first sentence, paragraph, and chapter are what need more revision. Dewulf recommends to first-time writers to erase the first chapter altogether: typically the real story starts in the second paragraph of the second chapter. Link to the interview (by The Creative Penn): 

I am taking a course on scientific writing and today we analyzed a text brought by another student. Apparently, it is the standard style of how people write in her field. I found very hard to understand the abstract: Dobson, Amy Shields, and Akane Kanai. "From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry: Affective dissonances in young women’s post-recessional media."  Feminist Media Studies  19.6 (2019): 771-786. It feels that written communication has become very complex in some disciplines, but it is not only due to jargon. I feel it is over-complicated, but this over-complication is considered good writing.  It reminds me of legalistic documents (in that case texts are over-complicated on purpose so that only people in the field can understand them).  Anyway, I tried to change the text according to what I understood, just as an exercise. I tried to keep the vocabulary of the field like "feeling rules" and "affective dissonance", whatever they mean. I am still ...

Yesterday I was watching a video about discovery writing, i.e., writing without outlining: the writer does not know  a priori   how the story will unfold - the story is being "discovered" as it is being written.  I used this technique  at school,  without realizing it, to write short stories, and it is very satisfying. But the problem with discovery writing is that you may not get a good finalization for the story - which is highly unsatisfying. However, many writers do discovery writing because it is the one that resembles the most the process of reading. You can hear discoverer writers say, "if I know the end, why would I want to write the story?" Outliners, on the other hand, are on the other side of the spectrum: they have a clear structure of the book divided into scenes and what happens in each scene. The full plot is known before writing, so you can make sure that everything is coherent and has a satisfying ending. However, the drawback of outlining is th...

I do not know what caused it, but today I finally realized this: it does me good to have many pursuits. However, there were many periods of my life where I focused on just one thing. I did focus only on math as an undergraduate. I even dropped out from basketball. I wanted to devote myself body and soul to maths so that I could become the best I could be. I ended up burned out and "fleeing" to France for an Erasmus because I was very unhappy. Something similar happened later when I was hyper-focused on my research career. And I burned out a second time. Now I have many pursuits and interests: research, writing, coaching, doing videos, ukulele, a husband. And I give importance to all of them - I try not to be defined by just one of them. Having so many pursuits - even though it is sometimes overwhelming -   feels  good. It gives me well-being; balance - it keeps me away from obsession. This reminded me of some things that author Matthew Dicks wrote in his book "Someday is...

Randy Ingermanson came up with the "Snowflake method" for outlining novels. It is an analytical approach to plotting, based on iteratively refining ideas for the novel.  I will give this method a try. Given that I am quite analytical myself (Ingermanson is a doctor in Physics), maybe his method will suit me well. I will not explain the method here, but I give a link at the end. I was listening to an interview with Ingermanson and there are  three particular points that thought of sharing: 1. The one-sentence summary.  The first step of the snowflake method - there are ten steps in total - consists of writing down a one-sentence summary of the novel. This is actually pretty difficult to do and, therefore, easy to get stuck there. Ingermanson recommends dedicating just one hour to this process and then moving on to the next step. This is not a problem because after each step we can revise and update the previous ones, so this one sentence will evolve during the process. I l...

In Zen philosophy, we are encouraged to focus more on the process needed to achieve a goal, rather than on the goal itself. Of course, goals are important - they give direction, - the point is that the process and the final product are not separated from each other - the process is part of the goal . Eckhart Tolle asks something along the lines: 'If in the end you achieve your goals, but you become depleted, was it worth it?'. That is why we are encouraged to take care of the process and live it joyfully - to avoid becoming victims of our achievements.  I was thinking about how many of our goals - when looking at them holistically - can be seen as processes. Say I write a blog post. One could think that my goal is the final product: the post. But I do not write to have a product - at least not just because of that. As a creator, I have two processes in mind: my own writing process, and the reader's reading process. My actual objective - producing a blog post - is just a mea...

Going from a post-doc position to a group leader position is a big jump. For me, the biggest difference is to have people under my care. And I use the expression "under my care" on purpose: I feel responsible for them - at least to an extent. This puts pressure. However, what puts more pressure on me is the mentality of "now I am a group leader", i.e., I have a new identity and I have to live up to its expectations. And what happens when group leaders feel that are not meeting their own standards? Group leaders may feel like hiding their own lack of knowledge and weaknesses. This is human, but also devastating. When leaders try to hide their vulnerabilities, they avoid situations of growth: asking questions, meeting people, starting discussions. Not only that, every situation is about " what does this say about me?" rather than being about the project, the people, the lesson. In the end, every situation becomes a potential threat - a threat to their ident...

When a PhD student produces a new piece of maths, checking its correctness can be very daunting. Typically, there is a high communication barrier: it is simply not easy to communicate maths. In this case, I think that  going line by line through their document - having the PhD student next to you - may be the best strategy; even though it is very time-consuming.  Going line by line with them can be good because they can see at which points their explanation is not clear; at which points notation is not consistent or definitions are ambiguous; where more details are needed. In this sense, it also saves time and energy: trying to understand the text while having its writer at hand to ask questions can make the process less tedious and faster. Of course, I am talking about documents where the student wants to check out the math, not just editing a text to make it understandable.  If it is just editing, I am hoping that the text will be clear enough so that I would not need t...

After more than a week of starting this blog, I realized that there is something about it that I really like: the revision part. Normally I write quite a lot by doing journaling and putting down ideas or random thoughts. But this type of writing, even though it feels nice, it never gets a proper revision - it is never written having in mind that someone else may read it. I like the revision part: the purification of the text, the evolution of the original idea, killing the darlings, erasing unnecessary words, and reducing the text as much as possible. With a big text, revision can be tedious, but blog entries are bite size.  It is the revision process that gives me the feeling of getting a final product and the satisfaction that comes with it. There is also an inner transformation during the process - sometimes the original message can transmute. Brandon Sanderson - I already talked about this author - wrote more than ten novels before getting published, but he never got down to ac...

There was a time when I doubted that meeting PhD students every week and getting involved in their projects was a good way of supervising and doing research. When I started supervising I met my PhD students once a week, but I was trying not to get too involved in their projects. Already by meeting them so often, I was  feeling a bit guilty and unsure: "Is this the right thing to do? Will this affect their independence and their development as a researcher?" A common type of supervisor that one finds in pure maths is the "hands-off" supervisor , they will typically say: "This is your project, not mine, do not come to me until you get results or get stuck; then, we discuss - and Latex everything before coming". Typically, students are a bit left on their own to struggle and try to find their way by themselves. Many times advisors give students projects and they do not work on them. T he project of the student is only theirs: it is not the project of the supe...

 I decided to do educational videos and post them on YouTube.  Today I posted the first video. After having made it, I realized that: - I do not pronounce well some words; - my voice stills sounds funny to me; - some things are not going to be completely clear to the students (I should have defined better some notation!) - it took a lot of time to actually do it, even though each part of the process does not take so long; - I was left with the doubt "Do I want to do this again?" Everyone warns you that the first video is going to be crap. Well, they are right in my case, but I am just glad that it is out there. I hope to keep posting and improving. I heard that it takes around 20 videos to start doing something decent. Hopefully, I will not stop now.

For Christmas, I went back home to Spain and I noticed something that I have been trying to assimilate since then: many of the people I know and love have become old.  I am not talking about the type of "old age" that we associate with physical decay. I felt that they have become old because they only seem interested in the past, or rather, they do not seem interested in their present or their future unless they have something to do with the younger generation - their kids and grandchildren. I was shocked because I need to let go of the past to focus on the present and the future. There are so many things happening now, so many things to plan, to decide, and choices to make, why would I spend so much time in the past? But I guess that when you have been a parent and you have had a career, it may be tough to think of any other project as more engaging than those. When do we stop thinking about the possibilities in life? Are they looking forward to something in the future? I kn...

I really like the Stoics and Epictetus is my favorite one. H ere are some of his quotes: "Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are our opinions, pursuits, desires, aversions, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions ." "There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond our control " The concept 'action' in the first quote is fundamental and it appears also in many other contexts, like the Zen culture. Epictetus says that under our control are our actions .  The fifth Buddhist remembrance says "My only possessions are my actions. I cannot avoid the consequences of my actions" .  Krishnamurti says " Life is action" . I find these three philosophies to be linked through the concepts of 'action' and 'choice'. If what is under our control are our actions, then we must  choose   our actions . Hence, making the right choices  is the basis of r...

I recently came across young colleagues concerned about how to manage their anxiety when giving oral presentations. I remember the first time I did a talk at a conference. It was during my Ph.D and at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute, in Vienna. Bless the organizers, they had put me on the first day - the last talk in the afternoon. I was not able to listen to any of the talks before mine. I was that nervous. The first day of the conference was lost to me. If I had talked on the last day, I would have been nervous for the whole week. To make things worse, the room was full - I had never been to a conference with so many participants - and the work I was going to present was a continuation of something initiated by two researchers that were there.  The only thing that I was capable of before my talk was to count away the time left for my onstage execution. How to deal with nerves? In the long run,  I think the best is to just keep giving talks - in different contexts, to differe...

“Writing apparently filled a void I was feeling in my heart, just before I turned thirty.” – Haruki Murakami

There is a delicate balance between what I want to do and what I must do to "survive".  Now that I am tenured - I have a permanent job, - I have more freedom to decide what to do (how to direct my research, how to run my group, how to teach). There is a lot of freedom in the 'what to do' but also in the 'how', and both are important.  Freedom comes with a price: one must constantly apply it in a conscious way. It is too easy to get swept by inertia; by what is trendy; by what we think others expect from us. Psychologically, it is safer to follow the trend rather than to be authentic.  After all, if we fail, at least we fail "doing what was expected from us". U nder these circumstances,  failure seems more acceptable. On the other hand, succeeding in this manner may be a failure in disguise: a success by consensus may not be a real success.  I do believe that everyone is unique in terms of motivations, skills, beliefs, experiences,..., and what makes ...

Following the previous post , there are even more analogies between writers and researchers in mathematics. Typically writers are categorized into two types: the discoverers (they write without a plot in mind) or the plotters (the ones that organize all the scenes, the points of view, and the structure). Discoverers do not know what is going to happen next, plotters know everything. Typically writers are in between these two extremes. I think researchers are more the 'discovery' type. We have some kind of end goal that can be more or less vague, and some initial path to get there, but that is where our understanding of the plot ends. When walking the initial path new things are learned, new questions are asked, new curiosity is spiked and new motivation is born. So we keep changing paths, goals, and the story. As a consequence, we create a lot of work that will go to the bin: piles of written papers that will not appear in the end product, but that was necessary to reach the de...

Tomorrow, back to work. It has been the first long holiday (2 weeks) in a long time. Among other things, I read the book "Someday is today" by the novelist and storyteller Matthew Dicks. I found it great. It is especially useful for creative people that do not manage to find the time (and strategy) to get things going. Dicks is a brave and generous guy: he goes out there and exposes his journey and vulnerabilities. I found him a true source of inspiration. Reading "Someday is today" and "Storyworthy" (another book of his) , I found quite a few analogies between being a researcher (in mathematics) and being an artist: Despair (of not knowing if you will make it or if you will be good enough): Apparently, both Matthew Dicks and Stephen King (and others) had a moment of despair where they thought that they would never become novelists; nobody was going to buy their books. The same tends to happen in maths: PhD students (and post-docs) tend to go through a ...