Quomodocumque

We have mostly settled into a routine here. In the morning the kids have school. The 8th grade has a couple of on-the-screen meetings most days, but the 3rd grade has almost no real-time instruction, just assignments described in video clips by the teachers. That feels right to me; I’ve heard about kids in other cities asked to be in front of the laptop camera for six hours a day as if it made sense to hew to the usual schedule, and that sounds nuts to me. In the afternoon AB has “camp” for two hours where she does art projects with a counselor and a group of kids, mostly from here and there in the US, one from Costa Rica. CJ is still baking a lot — oatmeal raisin cookies yesterday.

It works, basically. I had a lot of ambitions for “things I’ve always wanted to do with the kids but we’re too overscheduled to get to them,” and most of those have been unrealized. I wanted us to play music together and record some tracks. I wanted CJ to do a coding project. I thought, being in the house all day, we could do some reorg and cleaning of the house. Those things didn’t happen (for the good reason that the kids didn’t actually want to do them.) On the other hand, both kids are doing AOPS courses, AB and I have learned to throw a Frisbee forehand, CJ and I watched The Mandalorian (much better overall than any of the last three movies). I always felt I should get into gaming with the kids and AB and I are now working our way through Pikuniku.

Of course, the fact that I can even think about opportunity as well as burden is because I am in the very lucky position of having a job that doesn’t go away during a pandemic, and I don’t have people in the house at high risk of serious illness, so I can safely accept the modest risk of infection that comes with shopping, taking walks, etc.

Nobody I know has died of this yet. Two people I know have lost parents, another an aunt, another a grandparent. I guess it depends what you mean by “know.” John Conway died of COVID last week. Is that somebody I know? He’s somebody I’d chat with when I was around the Princeton math department. His famous theorems are familiar, but in the round of admiration attending his death I learned one I didn’t know; given any six points in R^3, you can partition them into two groups of three in such a way that the resulting two triangles are linked. That’s cool, but the proof is even cooler — it turns out that the sum of the linking numbers over all 10 such partitions is always odd! My favorite kind of existence proof is “there are an odd number of these things so there aren’t zero of them.”

Our neighborhood bakery and our favorite breakfast place got PPP small business loans so they can continue to pay their employees for the next couple of months. That loan program ran out of money in 28 seconds or something but Congress is planning to fill the bucket with money again, they say. Campus is still closed but the undergraduates are rebuilding it in Minecraft. The governor has released a plan to start reopening schools and more businesses, once cases in Wisconsin start showing a consistent decline. That looked like it might happen soon, but now there’s a new outbreak in Green Bay, tied to spread in the meatpacking plants there. (Yes, non-Wisconsinites, that’s why the football team is called that.) The workers who keep the food supply going, just like the doctors and nurses treating patients, are unavoidably going to be exposed to a lot of risk, because, unlike me, they do work that can’t be done on a screen and can’t not be done.

One wants to feel useful. Of course, to an extent we are being useful by staying at home and not coming close to anyone outside the family. It’s incremental but somehow all this shared solitude generates a community spirit. We’re all in this, alone, together!

Of course when math is what you do you wish math were more useful, not in the true-but-abstract way we talk about math being useful, but useful today, in the face of what faces us. My colleagues Maria Chikina and Wes Pegden wrote up a model suggesting that we might do better to isolate younger people less than we are but older people much, much more. (Though whenever I leave the house I see older people are visibly out and about. Maybe it’s not up to “us.” Also, I am not really very much younger than older people anymore.) I was talking with Lior Silberman and Rachel Ward about pooling samples to mitigate what seems to be a shortage of COVID tests. Except nobody seems to really agree on whether there’s a shortage of tests or a shortage of administrative wherewithal to deploy the tests. Or maybe it’s swabs. There may not be enough swabs. And some people think we’re past the point in the United States where testing is useful, and maybe everybody should just treat themselves as if they’re infected. Anyway, they say you can test negative when you’re already infected but the viral load hasn’t built up enough for your sputum to set off the RNA detector.

Some rules everyone agrees on. If you must go outside, is to keep six feet of distance between you and anyone else. (Someone on Twitter asked whether they could still have sex, and got the answer: “If you can do it from six feet away, great!”) Wash hands for twenty full seconds, interlace the fingers to get the in-betweens, dig nails of one hand under the nails of the other to get any virus lurking under there. (Other sources recommend twisting the nails against the opposite palm in a circular motion for the same effect.) Some people are getting takeout, other people consider that risky. They say the virus can live 24 hours on cardboard, a few days on plastic and metal. Our neighborhood bookstore is closed for browsing but Joanne the proprietor is taking special orders. Two of AB’s came in so we stopped by to pick them up. I seemed more concerned about staying six feet from her than she was about staying six feet from me. I felt like a hero for having a no-touch credit card. She said the hard part was not really understanding when it was going to end. On the way home a guy with a stroller crossed the street so as not to pass us on the sidewalk.

The May conference in Germany on arithmetic statistics I was organizing for the Simons Foundation was postponed to an unnamed later date. Our moduli spaces conference here in Madison, which my student Soumya Sankar put a ton of work into, planned for next week, was cancelled too, of course. Just eight days ago we thought we were deciding whether or not to cancel it.

It’s so small in the big picture but I find myself moved by the small things I’m used to that are cancelled. United has shut down the direct flights from Madison to San Francisco and Los Angeles. I have to doubt they’ll come back soon, in the austere travel environment to come. The Isthmus, our alternative paper that’s been in press for 44 years, is shutting down. Maybe it would have gone out of business anyway. Most of those papers have.

Games played with kids: Mastermind 1. Monopoly 1. Big Boggle 4. Set 4. I am planning for Scrabble tomorrow.

I wrote to a friend on Monday, “I think we are going to be, like, playing 30 mins of Scrabble and then sniping at each other and I’ll relent and let AB watch Worst Cooks on the iPad. And I’ll look at Twitter and fume at all the academic parents who are like “it was so good for the kids and I to finally get the chance to act out Socrates’s dialogues, thanks coronavirus!!” So with that in mind I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I actually did a lot of math with AB today. Things I had been meaning to sit down and work through with her but didn’t find time when I didn’t have hours of time I needed to somehow fill. There are moments, lots of moments, where she rears back from instruction but today, for whatever reason, she was into it, and we just kept going. Area of isosceles triangles via Pythagorean theorem, then Heron’s formula — she liked very much the idea that they don’t teach it in regular geometry class. (They don’t, do they?) She is pleased with the word “semiperimeter.” In the context of areas, some approximation of square roots by decimals. Positive and negative exponents. And finally the Euclidean algorithm. In school they’re reducing fractions to simplest form and this was satisfyingly magical, to show how you can learn what to divide by without dividing.