Long Walks On Leafy Streets

6/13/2013 Ossendrecht, Netherlands (Thanks to Rama Satish)
Today they forecast strong thunderstorms and heavy rains throughout the day. So I decided to stay at home and work from here. I am lucky that I am in a profession where I can work from anywhere. Since I am not teaching during the summer I am not bound to any particular place. I do prefer my office desk and the single-minded concentration that comes from being in a designated, quiet place of work. But during the summer especially I frequently go out to different places such as libraries, parks and coffeehouses to work. The change in scenery and being in the company of other people or nature stimulates the mind and helps to bring out new ideas. I often think about my research problem during my long walks. I also like to think about mathematics while lying on bed but that can result in a bit of disruption if one ends up being awake for several hours. You may ask, is mathematics not a dry subject? How can one spend so much time thinking about it? The answer is, absolutely not.
Mathematics is after all, the study of the patterns hidden in nature. Those patterns may be concrete, such as the arrangement of petals in a flower. They could also be abstract – you can call them the patterns behind the patterns. I find the same joy in learning and thinking about mathematics as I do in looking at the different animals and plants in the area.
In the previous post I had written about my newfound interest in learning the names of different plants and trees. It is not entirely new but before I simply had not been very diligent, content to hear about it from friends or in botanical gardens. Now I actively seek out information. Although I am still not at a place where I want to learn the subtle differences between various subspecies of a particular tree, I do want to know the difference between a magnolia and a dogwood, or a willow oak and a black oak. I was happy to find several magnolia trees on my walk. Magnolias seem to be a hallmark of the southern United States. Some people consider Washington, DC as being part of the south. There are some southern trees and plants here. But when we visited New Orleans in 2011 it was the first time I was in the Deep South. The sheer variety of new and exotic plants was very exciting to me. Although I am originally from the tropics and the heat and humidity of New Orleans did remind me of Chennai, the flora of the temperate south are different, while no less abundant and magical. The magnolia tree is among the most magnificent of them all. Its large leaves and flowers take one back to a prehistoric era. In fact it is also one of the oldest trees in the planet and has features that predate those in more modern trees that propagate through pollination.
There is now a lull in the rains and the winds. The sky is still very cloudy but the tap dancing of the drops on the roof has stopped. I will now go back to working on my beloved mathematical problem, the basic idea for which first occurred to me while I was camping by myself in Jane’s Island several years ago.

Directory Previous