Endings

Very tired

Barely make words work

Write a blog? 

Oh that’s a good idea

I’m very sorry but I do need to write about this. It will be even more drivilicious than normal but what can you do?

Education likes to mark the end of something as though it’s a grief. A graduation is a bit like a funeral. You sit in a big building and clap for all those that have passed. The best bit is when you can get outside and throw your hat in the air. It was my son’s delayed graduation this week and I made him go. He wasn’t keen but I hope he will be glad that he did it, when he looks back. A graduation, like a funeral is for those that are left behind anyway. We needed time to be proud. And we couldn’t have been prouder. The one thing that our family is brilliant at it laughing through difficult things. 

His ceremony was for the Maths and Philosophy departments (which are natural bedfellows) and if you ever need reminding that you really aren’t very clever I can recommend sitting through one of these. When the maths PhDs were awarded they reads out what they were for and every single one was incomprehensible to us mere mortals.

Quantum enhanced matter wave griavimetry

Thermal Sunyaev Zel’dovich effect from the Epoch of Reionozation

Neoliberal parabolic stochastic partial differential equation with application to finance

Searches for charging and neural info production in decays to three lepton final states via intermediate bosons using square root of s = 13TeV proton proton collisions with the ATLAS detector

Inverse problems for hyperbolic conversion laws

By the time it got to the Philosophy thesis’ the room got quite giddy with excitement about something understandable and then hysterical about what they pictured in their heads.

After Shave: a cultural history of female body hair removal.

When I graduated and my daughter graduated they picked a celebrity to get an honorary degree. I remember feeling cheated. Why should that person not have done the work I’d done? I had grown up enough to appreciate Una Stubbs at my daughter’s graduation (even if the Long Suffering Husband had misheard and got disappointed that it wasn’t going to be a talk on Mizunu Clubs). At this graduation the honorary degree was met with confused appreciation. This was a genuine mathematical genius, Alesso Figalli, who had been working with the University and deserved their recognition. He also had the best outfit: a bright yellow gown and a gold fez. Of course, none of us understood why he was a genius but they told us that it didn’t matter. That’s the thing with maths, it’s in everything but it would blow most of our tiny minds to understand it all.

From this I go into a final week of endings. It will be time to say goodbye to students and colleagues and we will do this in our usual excited, exhausted, slightly inappropriate state. I’m fully expecting the staff room to be googling duck cloacas and the dark side of duck sex by lunchtime today.