I am building a website for the Analysis + Data Group that I am helping establish at WSU. I am trying something new, in order to communicate to potential student recruits much more than a usual mathematics website communicates. I want students who visit the website to begin to get a feel for how we think, who we are, even what it is like to think with us and learn with us. To do this I am partly using non-standard (for mathematics) photography: no mugshots allowed!

(A little about the group: there are five principal members — myself, Bala Krishnamoorthy, Haijun Li, Charles Moore, and Alex Panchenko — and about 12 Graduate Fellows in it — that number will firm up this fall. We will focus both on pure analysis and applications of insights from analysis to data problems.)

Here are a few of the photos I have already taken (or my son Levi has taken of me), that I will be using in the new website.

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Alex Panchenko, who combines insights from nonlinear analysis and statistical physics in his work in analysis/applied analysis.

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Chuck Moore, who works on problems in PDE and Harmonic Analysis.

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KRV, about to explain 4.2.25 to Levi (and Obi).

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This project has revived my interest in photography. As a result, I have also been doing some macro work, on my walks with Obi.

The last picture, of the aphid farm being tended by the ants, pushes the limits of the Samsung S-4 phone I have been using to get these pictures. So it has prompted me to get some new equipment. In that process I discovered Mathieu and Heather’s wonderful blog on  mirrorless cameras and photography MiirrorLessons. They introduced me to the electronic photography magazine Inspired Eye  which I also recommend without reservation. The two founding editors of the magazine — Olivier Duong and Don Springer — have precisely the right attitude/philosophy. That philosophy results in an environment that is rich and generous, a fact that is made abundantly clear once you read and  experience the resulting publication. They get art, in a fundamental way. That might seem like a funny statement since the magazine is about photography, and mostly street photography at that. But I stand by what I said — they get art in a way that very few do.

And life is about art, be it creative work in mathematics, or the way one makes food, or the way we (can) relate to others, or how we think and write. While it doesn’t upset me any more, I still protest when people express the idea that mathematics is somehow a non-creative non-art. Those kinds of statements are my cue for very gentle, non-forceful illumination.

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I will post a link to the new group website when it is released in a few weeks.