Rage of the Blackboard

Constanza Rojas-Molina is a postdoc at the Institute of Applied
Mathematics of the University of Bonn. Gudrun Thäter met her in
Bonn to talk about Constanza's blog The Rage of the Blackboard.
The blog’s title makes reference to an angry blackboard, but also
to the RAGE Theorem, named after the mathematical physicists D.
Ruelle, W. Amrein, V. Georgescu, and V. Enss." Standing at a
blackboard can be intimidating and quite a few might remember
moments of anxiety when being asked to develop an idea in front
of others at the blackboard. But as teachers and scientists we
work with the blackboard on a daily basis and find a way to
"tame" its "rage".


Gudrun and Constanza share that they are working in fields of
mathematics strongly intertwined with physics. While Gudrun is
interested in Mathematical Fluid dynamics, Constanza's field is
Mathematical physics. Results in both fields very much rely on
understanding the spectrum of linear (or linearized) operators.
In the finite-dimensional case this means to study the
eigenvalues of a matrix. They contain the essence of the action
of the operator - represented by different matrices in differing
coordinate systems. As women in academia and as female
mathematicians Gudrun and Constanza share the experience that
finding the essence of their actions in science and defining the
goals worth to pursue are tasks as challenging as pushing science
itself, since most traditional coordinate systems were made by
male colleagues and do not work in the same way for women as for
men. This is true even when raising own children does not enter
the equation.


For that Constanza started to reach out to women in her field to
speak about their mathematical results as well as their
experiences. Her idea was to share the main findings in her blog
with an article and her drawings. When reaching out to a
colleague she sends a document explaining the goal of the project
and her questions in advance. Constanza prepares for the personal
conversation by reading up about the mathematical results. But at
the same moment she is interested in questions like: how do you
work, how do you come up with ideas, what do you do on a regular
day, etc.


The general theme of all conversations is that a regular
day does not exist when working at university. It seems that
the only recurring task is daily improvisation on any schedule
made in advance. One has to optimize how to live with the
peculiar situation being pushed to handle several important tasks
at once at almost any moment and needs techniques to find
compromise and balance. An important question then is: how to
stay productive and satisfied under these conditions, how to
manage to stay in academia and what personal meaning does the
word success then take. In order to distill the answers into a
blog entry Constanza uses only a few quotes and sums up the
conversation in a coherent text. Since she seeks out very
interesting people, there is a lot of interesting material.
Constanza focuses on the aspects that stay with her after a
longer thought process. These ideas then mainly drive the blog
article. Another part of the blog are two drawings: one portrait
of the person and one which pictures the themes that were
discussed and might not have made it into the text.


Surprisingly it turned out to be hard to find partners to talk
to, and the process to make it a blog entry takes Constanza a
year or longer. On the other hand, she feels very lucky that she
found women which were very generous with their time and in
sharing their experiences. Besides the engagement and love for
what they do, all the participants had this in common: they were
already promoting the participation of women in science. To learn
from them as a younger researcher means, for example, to see the
own impact on students and that building a community is very
important, and a success in its own. Though Constanza invests a
lot of time in the blog project, it is worth the effort since it
helps her to work towards a future either in or outside academia.


Gudrun and Constanza found out that though both of their projects
explore mathematical themes as well as people working in
mathematics, the written parts of blog and podcast differ in that
what makes it into the notes in Constanza's blog is, so to say,
bonus material available only for the listening audience in
Gudruns podcast (since it is never in the shownotes). In that
sense, Gudrun's podcast and Constanza's blog are complementary
views on the life of researchers.


Constanza did her undergraduate studies in La Serena in Chile.
She started out with studying physics but soon switched to
mathematics in order to understand the basics of physics. When
she had almost finished her Masters program in La Serena she
wanted to continue in science abroad. She was admitted to a
french (one year) Master program at the University Paris 6 and
later did her PhD in the nearby University Cergy-Pontoise. After
that she applied for a Marie-Curie fellowship in order to
continue her research in Germany. She spent time as postdoc at
the Mittag-Leffler-Institut in Stockholm and at CAMTP in Maribor
(Slovenia) before moving to the LMU Munich for two years with the
fellowship. After that she got the position in Bonn and is now
preparing for her next step.


Gudrun and Constanza want to thank Tobias Ried who put them in
contact.
References and further reading

Women in Math statement

Constanza Rojas-Molina: Etude mathématique des propriétés de
transport des opérateurs de Schrödinger aléatoires avec structure
quasi-cristalline (The mathematical study of electronic transport
in random Schrödinger operators with quasicrystalline
structures). PhD-thesis Université de Cergy-Pontoise, 2012.

A. Pohl: Quantenchaos, Conversation with G. Thäter in the
Modellansatz Podcast, Episode 79, Fakultät für Mathematik,
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), 2016.
http://modellansatz.de/quantenchaos

Constanza's illustration blog