Today I learned about connections between musical rhythm and knot theory, abstract algebra and dance, a Navy ship from the mid 1800s called the U.S.S. Constellation, and some great undergraduate real analysis pedagogy. In today’s post, I’ll share with you some of the most interesting mathematical ideas I heard today.

I am in Baltimore to attend the 2014 Joint Mathematics Meetings, the largest gathering of mathematicians in the world involving the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematics Association of America, and many other professional societies related to the mathematics profession. There will be over 2500 talks given on topics ranging from the mathematics of pop-up books (#489) to the density of Henig efficient points in locally convex topological vector spaces (#2341) to rational numbers and the common core (#903). Thousands of mathematicians, teachers, and students will be rubbing elbows and talking shop. There will be a mathematical art gallery and film screenings. Last year there were even performances of a mathematical play! This will be my third time attending the Joint Meetings. The previous two times were a total blast.

A colleague who had been worried about one of her star students who had been missing from class for a couple of weeks came into my office. “She committed suicide yesterday.” She needed to talk through it. She told me that she and two other professors had gone to the Student Services people a few days earlier—on a weekend—concerned about the student. She told me about all the ways they had tried to get to the bottom of what was going on in the days leading up to it. Any reasonable person would describe their efforts as far above and beyond the call of duty, as not just responsible but compassionate. “If I had seen her before it happened, I would have tackled her to the ground,” she said with the sincerity and desperation of someone struggling to find how after all of that effort things still went wrong. But you can’t. No tackle could wrest this student from the grip of tragedy. You try to be there for the students, to be supportive and available. But now and then a student will die.