letters to Part III

Conferences.  If you stay in the trade, conferences will be part of your life, and December is a popular time, if not so popular as mid summer.  Musing back to memorable conferences, I find it is not the mathematical thrills that have stuck in mind after several decades, but the human aspect.  Scheveningen, swimming in the sea, Utah, a toe curlingly embarrassing experience consequent upon severe jet lag and a minor conflagration in the hotel, Salamanca and the missing luggage, Hamburg, pleasant accommodation in a comfortable B+B when we (the only two women at a conference) were excluded from the rest of the group at the Military Highschool, which had no accommodation for women, Utah, again, getting lost in choke cherries in the mountains. So many to choose from.  Happy days.  But if I were to choose one, it probably has to be this story.  Children lend such colour to life, and to the experience of conferences. ----------------------  December ...

When I was doing things for Part III I started giving a talk on revision strategy.   My reason for doing so was part of my humiliating experience on the first occasion of attempting the MSc exams at Warwick. One contributing factor to that disaster was a complete failure to understand the style of exam I was up against, and complete absence of any strategy to prepare for it.   Perhaps I should explain. My undergraduate training compressed four years worth of courses at Smith College, a woman's liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, into three years. At the end, my level of knowledge was not up to Part IB standards, and significant parts of that had been self-taught. Don't get me wrong, I learned some stunningly important things at Smith; I learned that I liked doing mathematics research, and that I was good at it, and I learned to read. And I resolved that no one was going to bully me out of being a mathematician, and I had excellent support in that decision, but ...