The Joint Mathematics Meetings are a large annual math conference, so named because they are the joint annual meeting of the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society (and have significant participation from several other societies/associations). This year was my eighth JMM, and I love them every year. JMM was last week, and some of my friends expressed confusion at my great enthusiasm for the meetings, so I thought I'd try to explain a bit.
You can trace back my love of the JMM to the first day of the first year I attended, when my parents and I walked into the exhibits. The exhibits are filled with booths, mostly run by publishers. In later years, going through the exhibits booth by booth and choosing one or two books to buy would become a highlight of the meetings. But not everyone in the exhibits is a publisher. There's always a table for Budapest Semesters in Mathematics and one for Be An Actuary, there are mathematical artists, and, most importantly to this story, some booths that sell mathematics related toys.
That first year, 2007, was the only year since I've started coming that Zometool has attended, but I am very glad they did, because when I walked into the exhibits, they were building a giant polyhedron. (At the time I could have told you what it was, but it's been a few years.) When I came over, curious and excited to see Zome (which I played with at home), the two men working the booth invited me to help them build. I'm not sure how long I spent there with them, but I'd guess it was at least an hour, building this structure with two people (and several others who stopped by) who treated me like I knew what I was doing. I went back to help again later in the week, and then to admire the finished polyhedron. So from the very beginning, my experience of JMM was one of mathematical community, of being respected and treated as a member of that community, and of wonder at mathematical beauty.
My sense of community at JMM has only grown over the years as I met people through Mathcamp, Research Science Institute, AoPS, Olin, BSM, RIPS this past summer, and even just being at JMM year after year. (Last year someone introduced himself to me starting with, "You like combinatorics, right? I've seen you in sessions the past few years.") This year wasn't as good as last year in terms of talking to people at sessions if I didn't already know them, but I spent a lot of time with RIPS and BSM friends. The past couple of years, I've helped at the BSM exhibit booth, and that means I get to talk to a lot of prospective students about Budapest, which is always exciting. I'm also very comfortable talking to BSM and Mathcamp alumni from other years at the reunions, whether I've met them before or not.
I still love the exhibits, but these days, I love them for the books. I go through each publisher's booth, looking for books that seem interesting that year, and if I see something, I pick up the list of titles and make a note of the ones that caught my eye. I'll usually come back another day to look at those books and eventually choose one or two that I'd like. What I end up buying varies a lot from year to year. This year I chose books about inverse problems and the math of climate science; last year I bought a graph theory book about expander graphs. Getting books from the exhibits lets me take home a little bit of the meetings and continue seeing interesting math. It helps me build my math library. And while it's certainly possible to buy math books at other times of the year, it's easiest at JMM, when the books are all on sale, and it's convenient to flip through the books and see what they're like.
And then there's the math: thousands of presentations, a dozen mini courses, and hundreds of posters in just four days. JMM was one of the first ways I learned how very broad math is. Even the first couple of years I attended, I could go to math and art or math and sports presentations and understand. From those two years I remember lectures about math and music, math and dance, the mathematical techniques that Pixar uses. I went to shorter talks about math and fiber arts, and remember one in particular about lace. My second year I attended a mini-course on the Fibonacci and Catalan numbers, which helped inspire my still-enduring love of Catalan numbers above most other integer sequences. When I went back to the JMM in high school, I started going to combinatorics and graph theory research sessions, as well as sessions on the math of games and puzzles. Through college, I've gone to a more diverse set of sessions. This year I spent most of my time at modeling, applied math, and graph theory talks, but also attended talks on partial differential equations, research on sea ice, cryptography, and a couple of art and sports talks.
I've started presenting over the past few years. I've now been in the undergrad poster session twice and given ten minute talks three times.It's always a bit nerve-wracking, but it's also fun. It's an opportunity to communicate the key techniques and results, and the questions people ask can inspire new research problems.
There's always more that I want to see or do than I possibly can, and there are plenty of sessions that focus on topics I've barely heard of. The JMM is huge. Some people are intimidated by that, the size and the breadth, but I think I learned how to go to the meetings before I understood just how large they were, and now I revel in that immensity. There is so much mathematics, so much to learn and explore, and the JMM is full of people talking about how they extended the boundaries of our mathematical knowledge.
The Joint Meetings are math and mathematical community at their most intense for four days, and that, for me, is the joy of JMM.
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