WARM-UP: CONFERENCE SKILLS

Discuss the following questions in groups. Make notes to be able to summarize the main information.
(activities prepared by Robert Helán)


1. Have you ever attended a conference? If yes, what was it like? If not, would you like to attend
one? Why/why not?



2. Why are conferences important for scientists?




3. What do the following words mean?



BIOSKETCH:




SECTION CHAIR:




CFP:




PROCEEDINGS:





4. You are going to organize a conference. What do you think you will need to do BEFORE / DURING /
AFTER a conference?

BEFORE

                                                    DURING

                                                                                                   AFTER



















Listening: The World’s Best Mathematician

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXJ-zpJeY3E


a)    Before listening, check the meaning of these words. Then answer questions.

prodigy       recreational maths        obsessive         condescending      breakthrough


1)   In his childhood, what did he like about mathematics? …………………………………………………………………………………………

2)   How does he explain the difference between participating in maths competitions and doing
research in maths? …………………………………………………………………………………………..

3)   Who influenced him in his childhood? …………………………………………………………………………………………..

4)   Why does he say that he was “accelerated”? …………………………………………………………………………………………..

5)   Why does he remember “question six”?
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...................

6)   Was he more competitive or “obsessive”? …………………………………………………………………………………………..

7)   Where did he meet Paul Erdős? ………………………………………………………………………………………….

8)   Which mathematician seemed to be most important to him? ………………………………………………………………………………………….

9)   Which methods does he use when doing mathematics? ………………………………………………………………………………………….

10)                Which part of mathematics is he not so good at?
………………………………………………………………………………………….

11)                What does he find more important in mathematical research: individual
independent work or
collaboration?...................................................................

12)                What does he say about trying to solve the Riemann Hypothesis?
…………………………………………………………………………………………


b)   Terence Tao, who is a professor at the Department of Mathematics at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and works in a number of mathematical areas, but primarily in
harmonic analysis, PDE, geometric combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory,
and algebraic combinatorics, and is also one of the editors of the Journal of the American
Mathematical Society, is going to give a keynote speech at a conference organized by the Department
of Mathematics and Statistics of Masaryk University. As a conference chair, how would you introduce
him and his talk? The title of his lecture is the Green–Tao Theorem.

(proved by Ben Green and Terence Tao in 2004, states that the sequence of prime numbers contains
arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. In other words, for every natural number k, there exist
arithmetic progressions of primes with k terms. The proof is an extension of Szemerédi's theorem.
The problem can be traced back to investigations of Lagrange and Waring from around 1770)


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