I was in Pittsburgh for a few days last week, the city that I first came to in this country (as a grad student at Carnegie-Mellon University). Oakland, whose streets I first walked almost thirty years ago, still had that same university hangout feel - the Oakland Original restaurant was still there, though the King's Court theater has been long gone. It was all very nostalgic, but also strangely melancholic. I suppose the melancholy came from memories of being 20, of trying to figure out my place in the world and my best strategies for happiness. It was tremendously exciting to be in this new American culture, but also tremendously stressful - plus, there was a long road of self-discovery that lay ahead. I realized last week how relieved I was to have survived all that excitement, all that stress, all that self-discovery, how lucky I felt to have made the journey to my present juncture in life.
Not to say that it was all philosophizing on my trip. I met some of the first friends I made in the US - Bob Souders, whose family hosted me for eight days in Aug, 1979 before the university started (great way to get adjusted to the country), and Nancy Pfenning, who was my officemate during grad school. Ah, all those evenings of playing cards (we gambled with pennies and munched on generic Giant Eagle pretzels) with fellow Math grad students at CMU. (I suppose if had we been in computer science, we'd have been inventing Google - but hey, we did come up with the nifty card game "Fibonacci Flush.")
Gave a reading at Joseph Beth's which went great except for a child screaming relentlessly from the top level and a cash register determined to drown out the dramatic passages. The official part of the trip occurred at the University of Pittsburgh the next day (Friday). It was a play reading and thesis defence of Cory Tamler's play, "City Lights Receding," which uses a central idea from quantum physics: a quantum particle can exist in two states simultaneously - it is only when measured that it is forced into one of them (and this is what one observes in the measurement). We played on this for the announcement of the talk I was giving beforehand, since I couldn't decide which of my dual interests I should talk about: "Manil Suri has 2 talks, one on the math of ficton, and the other on capturing India through fiction - he is not scheduled to give the first, or the second, or both, or neither." The idea was that I'd be "measured" in some way, and that would force me to choose one or the other (I had both prepared).
So Nancy actually took my blood pressure (pump, gauge and all) on stage as I mentally concentrated first on the India talk and then the math outreach talk. The high readings came to 121 and 118 (I was told this was quite good, much to my relief). So the choice I was forced into was the "Capturing India" talk. But the crowd seemed disappointed, so I put it to the vote - sure enough they wanted the math outreach talk. There are preciously few occasions when a mathematician is faced with an audience actually clamoring for a math lecture, so yes, that's what I gave. It went well - plus the play reading that followed was terrific. Congrats to Cory for pulling off such a wonderfully human play on quantum physics (remember, folks, you saw her name here first!).