Fin de Saint-Flour Probability Summer School

Attendants of Saint-Flour, based loosely on country of origin:

There were five from Purdue Univ. in the US,
three from Germany,
one from England (by birth at least; MANY worked at Oxford),
at least two from Eastern European countries,
a handful from Italy,
two from India,
a couple from Asia,
and let's say two dozen from France.

Alison Etheridge, the professor who gave an incredible series of lectures on the development and basics of probability models in population genetics, brought a number of French and German students who had been studying with her at Oxford. My interest in the subject brought me into closest contact with her students. The following facts also helped: (1) Alison was very interested in touring around the region, (2) liked company, and (3) we (she and her students and I) discovered we had complementary (though certainly not "complimentary") styles of humor. That is to say, she had wit that left a mark. Most times I could volley her insults back at her, or deflect them with bad puns. Most times.

For instance, she and Janosch (the implacable German) were saying at one point that they could only put up with so much of me at a time. I gently suggested that they had thus been trying to minimize their exposure to me. They agreed in earnest. I asked if this might be called the min-max principle.

I don't remember if anyone else laughed, because I didn't hear anything over my own giggling. Oh, and for the non-mathematical among us, the min-max principle is a mathematical statement about the set of eigenvalues of certain types of matrices. It's pretty unrelated to the joke.

I'm not going to say that I grew so close to these people that there were any tearful good-byes. Two weeks is just enough time to form friendships but not cliques. It was only on the last days that I heard any disparaging remarks made against anybody else. It was a small mark against an otherwise endlessly friendly (albeit a little shy) bunch. I would be excited to see any of these people at a conference/workshop/summer school in the future.

Habib, a French student of Alison's at Oxford, and I might even work on some research together! One afternoon at the cafe, during a violent storm of wind and rain that had driven us into a cafe, I mentioned a paper that I had read in American Naturalist and some ideas I had for a model that described the phenomena with a diffusion and a stochastic genetic process. He knows a lot more about stochastic processes and diffusion, and he refined my ideas into something more specific and tractable. Then, I grappled with these new ideas and extended them a bit, and soon we had an interesting (and tractable!) problem in front of us. So yeah; kinda cool.

Oh, and the ping-pong tournament came down to India vs. France. I think I remember the Indian guy winning. I was out in the first round. But I got so much better! I would definitely beat any of you.