My teaching statment

One bright morning I got an email from the department that I need to write a teaching statement. “What is this? What is this for?” I asked (the last time that I was asked to write a teaching statement was when I applied for a postdoc in North America in fall 2008, since then I got two tenure track positions and was promoted in Israeli universities and a teaching statement was never required). They answered: You know, teaching statement. What is your vision on teaching, your teaching philosophy. Now, I am totally convinced that one’s formulation of a teaching philosophy is completely independent of one’s actual teaching performance. To spell it out: nobody needs to have a teaching philosophy, and nobody should care about someone else’s teaching philosophy. On the other hand, I do happen to have some ideas on the subject (a philosophy of teaching, if you must) so why not write them down and send them in.

Human beings have evolved to be learners and teachers. The never ending drive to see what lies beyond the next mountain, to discover how the world operates, and to invent new tools, is what defines us as humans. We know how to learn, we want to learn. We know how to teach and we love to teach. Better: we know how to learn how to learn and teach, and we are a gifted species in our ability to do this in an ever changing environment.

From idea to paper in just fourteen years

The paper “CP-semigroups and Dilations, Subproduct Systems and Superproduct Systems: The Multiparameter Case and Beyond” is finally published (electronically): see here for the journal page. As I wrote on this blog before, we started working on the project in 2009, we completed work and submitted to the arxiv im March 2020. It is a very long paper (now 233 pages) and there aren’t many venues that publish papers of this length. We then tried a couple of journals who rejected our work, and then in May 2020 we submitted to the journal Dissertationes Mathematicae, which is the Polish Academy of Sciences’s analogue of Memoirs of the AMS (every paper constitutes an entire volume). Our paper was accepted in May 2022, we received the first proofs in November 2022, and now, a year later, after a very painstaking and painful editorial process, our paper is published as Volume 585 of Dissertationes Math. I have given some talks on this work, and will probably give some more talks, and we already have a new (much shorter!) paper under preparation making use of the general framework. Right now I do not want to talk about anything except to record the fact that this project that we have been working on for fourteen years is finally complete. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to draw conclusions on publishing, the life of a research mathematician, and the world.

The never ending paper

My paper On operator algebras associated with monomial ideals, written jointly with Evgenios Kakariadis, has recently appeared in Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. They gave me a link to share (the link will work for the next several weeks): click here for an official version of the paper.

The paper is a very long paper, so it has a very long introduction too. To help to get into the heart of editors and referees, we wrote, at some point, a shorter cover letter which attempts to briefly explain what the main achievements are. See below the fold for that.

But first, a rant!

The day I got tenure

I was on the phone, and there was a knock on my door. I mumbled something and in came the dean. “Oh, I see that you’re busy, I’ll come back later.”