Fellowship at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge

I'm a participant in the Modern History of Mathematics research program at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Science in Cambridge. This is a fun cultural experience, as the INI is a place for mathematicians to go and sit in offices, emerging periodically to stand together and write equations on blackboards. The other program running concurrently with ours is Equivariant Homotopy Theory in Context, which has got off to an energetic start with plenty of collaborative activity. Rather unexpectedly I found myself diagramming something on the smaller blackboard in my office as my officemate, Sandy Zabell of Northwestern, shares an interest in the Fish codes tackled by Colossus at Bletchley Park during the war. He contributed to the annotated edition of the General Report on Tunny which was an important source for my work with Mark Priestley on Colossus. 

The project runs for four months, but as I'm teaching and department chairing in Milwaukee I'll only be here for two shorter periods covering the launch workshop in January and a period of intensive collaboration during late-March and early-April for participants in the subproject focused on the history of computer science. Participants there include Troy Astarte, Ekaterina Babintseva, Lisebeth De Mol, David Dunning, Ursula Martin, Elisabetta Mori, and Ksenia Tatarcheko. I'm also hoping to use my time here to see a few more people in the UK, including a talk up at Newcastle University in January and one in Cambridge in April.