Tips for Students
What is a mathematics seminar?
A seminar is an opportunity for a mathematician to describe the idea of their research to people outside of their immediate mathematical community. We invite a number of speakers to give seminar talks in our department every semester, in order to help both faculty and students at SFSU to gain a broader perspective on who mathematicians are and what they’re working on.
Everyone in the SFSU mathematics community is invited to the seminars: undergraduate students at all levels, Master’s students, lecturer faculty, and professors in all research areas. We will encourage our speakers to recognize the breadth of this audience, and to do their best to communicate the big ideas of their work in a way that’s accessible to everyone, while still giving the experts in the audience a peek at the deeper story. This is a very difficult task to accomplish in just an hour, and the speakers are brave and generous for attempting it.
Because the speakers are communicating to people with widely varying mathematical backgrounds, almost no one will understand every word of the seminar talk. This is on purpose. Unlike a class, whose goal is to convey details and methods and practical know-how, the goal of a seminar is to give the audience just a taste of some of the objects and questions and pictures and terminology that other mathematicians use. Try not to get tripped up, or to allow your sense of belonging to be shaken, if the details of a talk don’t make sense to you. Just by hearing new mathematical words, you’re learning more than you think you are.
How do I know if I have the mathematical background I’ll need to understand the seminar?
We’ll ask each speaker to suggest prerequisites for their talk, and we’ll post these in the talk advertisement. This should give you an idea of what words the speaker will use without spending too much time defining them. That being said, try not to be discouraged from attending talks whose prerequisites you’re unfamiliar with; as mentioned above, you never know how much learning accumulates just by exposure, so why not? Just be mindful to take more of a spectator’s role in this case, allowing the space for question-asking to be taken first by the speaker’s target audience.
"Here's a phenomenon I was surprised to find: you'll go to talks, and hear various words, whose definitions you're not so sure about. At some point you'll be able to make a sentence using those words; you won't know what the words mean, but you'll know the sentence is correct. You'll also be able to ask a question using those words. You still won't know what the words mean, but you'll know the question is interesting, and you'll want to know the answer. Then later on, you'll learn what the words mean more precisely, and your sense of how they fit together will make that learning much easier. The reason for this phenomenon is that mathematics is so rich and infinite that it is impossible to learn it systematically, and if you wait to master one topic before moving on to the next, you'll never get anywhere. Instead, you'll have tendrils of knowledge extending far from your comfort zone. Then you can later backfill from these tendrils, and extend your comfort zone; this is much easier to do than learning "forwards". (Caution: this backfilling is necessary. There can be a temptation to learn lots of fancy words and to use them in fancy sentences without being able to say precisely what you mean. You should feel free to do that, but you should always feel a pang of guilt when you do.)" - Ravi Vakil